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NATIONAL EDUCATION 
IN GREECE 

In t|)e JpourtJ CTentuTg before (S^ixi^i 



By AUGUSTUS S. WILKINS, m.a., 

II 

FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON ; 

LATE SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; 

PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER 



ANASTATIC REPRINT OF THE EDITION LONDON 1873. 



NEW YORK 

Q. E S.TECHERT & CO. 

1911 



1 K^^ 



LONDON : 

PRINTED BY VIRTCK AND CO., 

CITY HOAD. 

ANASTATISCHE DRUCKERBI C.PARIS 

BERXIN,N.58 




TO THE RIGHT REVEREND 

CONNOP THIRLWALL, D.D., 

LORD BISHOP OF ST. DAVID'S, 
WITH PROFOUND VENERATION, 

AN ESSAY, 

WHOSE ONLY CLAIM ON THE NOTICE OF THE FIRST 

OF LIVING ENGLISH HISTORIANS IS, 

THAT IT COMES ASSOCIATED, HOWEVER UNWORTHILY, 

WITH THE NAME OF 

JULIUS CHARLES HARE. 



PREFACE. 



1 




1 



HE following essay obtained the 
Hare Prize in the University of 
Cambridge, a prize founded in 
1 86 1 by the friends of the Ven. Archdeacon 
Hare, "to testify their admiration for his 
character, and the high sense they enter- 
tained of his services to learning and 
religion." It is awarded once in every 
four years to the graduate of not more 
than ten years' standing from his first 
degree, who shall produce the best English 
Dissertation on some subject taken from 
Ancient Greek or Roman History, political 
or literary, or from the History of Greek 
or Roman Philosophy. The subject pro- 
posed by the Vice-Chancellor for the year 
1873 was "The Theories and Practice of 



viii PREFACE, 

National Education in Greece during the 
Fourth Century B.C." 

The subject of Greek education has been 
so thoroughly investigated, the passages 
in classical authors that bear upon it have 
been so industriously collected, and its 
principal merits and defects have been so 
fully expounded, that it is difficult now to 
write upon it with any originality. In this 
essay my aim has been mainly twofold, to 
group the facts familiar to every scholar 
round the idea of the relation of the State 
to the citizen, and to furnish a trustworthy 
sketch of this side of the life and thought 
of Greece for the use of the general reader. 
Now that the supreme importance of 
national education is happily so widely 
recognised, there are probably many who, 
though not having the power of studying 
for themselves the classical authors, still 
desire to know how the problems which 
are straining so severely the statesmen of 
to-day, were solved in the ancient world. 
I do not know any work in English which 
exactly suits this want, and therefore I 
have endeavoured to adapt this essay to 



PREFACE, ix 

the needs of a wider circle than that to 
which, under other circumstances, it miofht 
have seemed fitter to appeal. The autho- 
rities' used are in all cases referred to in 
the margin. In dealing- with Plato, I have 
been deeply indebted to his two great 
English exponents and critics. In other 
cases I have drawn chiefly on the scholars 
of Germany ; but all references to classical 
authors have been independently examined 
and verified. Unfortunately, the admirable 
sketch of the history of education among 
the Greeks and Romans by the well-known 
Danish scholar, J. L. Ussing (translated 
into German by Friedrichsen. Altona, 1870), 
and the copious collection of materials by 
K. F. Hermann in his Privatalterthumer 
(2nd edition by Stark. Heidelberg, 1870), 
did not reach me until I had written these 
pages. References to them have here and 
there been added in the course of revision. 

Owens College, Manchester, 
October^ 1873. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER L 

PAGE 

Introductory — Education in Sparta . . i 



CHAPTER II. 
Education at Athens 60 

CHAPTER III. 
Plato on Education loi 

CHAPTER IV. 
Aristotle on Education 135 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. — NATIONAL EDUCATION 
IN SPARTA. 




HE object of the present essdiy Ohjea of the 
will be to set forth, so far as our ^^^'^^^ 
extant authorities allow — ist, 
the popular Greek conceptions 
of the aims and methods of national edu- 
cation ; 2nd, the manner in which these 
conceptions were carried into practical 
effect, with their general results upon na- 
tional life ; and 3rd, the criticisms of the 
popular ideas and methods of education 
passed by the great Greek thinkers of the 
fourth century before our era, with the 
substitutes suggested by them. 
In attempting to deal with these ques- Limits of the 

. . . . , ^ inquiry, 

tions successively our attention will of 
necessity be limited almost wholly tc 

B 



2 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

Athens and Sparta. It is true that for 
a portion of the century under our more 
immediate consideration the hegemony of 
Greece falls to the lot of Thebes. But 
her supremacy was too brief and baseless 
for the thought of the Athenian writers 
(on whom we have mainly to depend) to 
be attracted to her institutions, social or 
political, in the same way in which it was 
challenged b}^ those of Lacedaemon. The 
Theban views and methods of education 
will therefore claim our notice rather by 
way of occasional contrast and comparison 
than as an independent portion of oux 
inquiries. And in regard to the other 
Hellenic communities, we find in almost 
every case, either that we have but hints 
and fragments of information which whet 
our interest rather than satisfy it, or that 
our authorities treat of periods excluded 
from this essay by the limits of time im- 
posed. Magna Graecia, the Aeolic colonies 
of Lesbos and the adjacent coast, Crete 
and Ionia, would all furnish matter of value 
for a general history of Greek education, 
which must here be regarded as excluded. 



DORIANS AND lONIANS. 3 

But happily the states on which we have Athens and 
the fullest information are not only ihose states, 
of the greatest intrinsic interest, but they 
may also be regarded as typical. From 
the earliest appearance of the Hellenic 
race on the stage of history, it presents 
itself to us as broadly divided into two 
great sections.* The division was never 
deep enough to sever the bond which 
united all together as members of a com- 
mon Hellas ; nor did it exclude numerous 
and occasionally important sub-divisions. 
Still, speaking with a certain latitude, we 
may say that a careful study of the leading . 
characteristics of the Dorian and Ionian 
races, and their mutual influence, will give 
us almost all we want for a knowledge of 
the mental and spiritual life of Hellas.f 
Now of these two races, Athens and Sparta 
were undoubtedly the recognised leaders 
and representatives; and therefore, if we 



*" E. Curtius has well shown that mioor divisions sink into 
insignificance compared with this great dualism, 

t The statement in Theophrast. Char. Proem, (worthless 
as is the authority on which it rests) is probably not fta from 
the truth — Tavrmv rS>v *£XXi7Va»t<> ofioitaf 7raiitV9fiivMV, 
Cp. Wittmann — ^Erziehuag und Unterricht bei Platon, p. 7. 



4 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

succeed in mastering the Athenian and 
Spartan systems of education, we shall be 
in possession of the main ideas current 
in the other Hellenic states, although their 
developement may well have been modified 
greatly by varying conditions in each in- 
dividual case. 
The Dorians, From the numerous and inconsistent 
legends of the origin of the Dorians, dis- 
cussed very fully by Ottfried Miiller, we 
can leam but little as to the influences 
which stamped upon them their well-marked 
character. It is possible that comparative 
philology, which has done so much for us 
already, may yet be able to give us some 
light on this subject ; but at present it can 
carry us no further than the days when 
the Italo-Hellenic people were still united.* 
We may perhaps conjecture that a life in 
the rough mountainous country of Northern 

The picttire of their common civilisation has been gra- 
phically sketched by Mommsen (i. 19-31) ; the materials 
for adding a few more details are given by Fick — ** Vcr« 
glcichendes Worterbuch " (2nd edition), pp. 421-504. I 
intentionally pass over the difficult question whether the 
Keltic tribes remained united inath the Italians up to and 
after their separation from the Hellenes. But cp. Pcile's 
"Etymology," 24-27 ; and Schleicher in Rhein. Mus. for 1859. 



THE DORIAN CHARACTER. 5 

Hellas, exposed to the constant assaults 
of the barbarians who were ever pressing 
southwards, was the main cause of their 
distinctive character. Dr. Donaldson, fol- 
lowing Kenrick, finds a trace of their 
earliest home in Greece in the very name 
Dorian (Awptets, 'Highlanders,* from $a and 
opos); and the more probable explanation 
of the name sanctioned by Prof. G. Curtius 
(vielleicht bedeutete auch Aojpi-s eigentlich 
Holzlandy Waldland, so dass die AcDpccTs 
unsem '* Holsaten " entsprachen) points 
in the same direction. Dr. E. Curtius 
says, I think with justice, that "in the 
full and broad sounds of their dialect we 
seem to recognise the chest strengthened 
by mountain air and mountain life." But 
oxir knowledge of their history before the 
dawn of trustworthy tradition is too slight 
to enable us to determine whether it was 
only external conditions which moulded 
their national life, or whether there were 
not far earlier race distinctions which con- 
tributed largely to fashion it. It is certain D(trian cha* 
that wherever w^e come upon them in 
historic times we find the same charac- 



6 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

teristic tendencies, obscured, it may be, 
in wealthy mercantile cities like Corinth 
(itself, however, to a large extent Achaean), 
and appearing in their unmixed clearness 
only in isolated states like Crete, yet 

nowhere wholly wanting. We have on 

one side a freshness and simplicity of life, 
a manly energy, a bright and joyous but 
self-restrained and calm religion — ^points 
on which Miiller delights to dwell; but on 
the other hand, a want of the free play of _ 
individual activity, the quick intellectual 
subtlety, the restless, inquisitive temper of 
the Ionian mind. Above all we have the 
great idea of the state dominating every 
member, and owning their absolute and 
unqualified obedience. In the vigorous 
and suggestive passage in which Mommsen 
compares the Italian and Hellenic charac- 
ters, he appears to have had in view 
throughout Athens as the type and crown 
of Hellas, we cannot say wrongly; but in 
many points the Dorians approach more 
nearly to the Italian than to the Athenian 
character ; and their conception of the claims 
of the state seems to have been one of 



THE INFLUENCE OF DELPHI. 7 

these. It cannot be said of Dorians that 

" they sacrificed the whole to its individual 

elements, the nation to the single state, 

and the single state to the citizen ; " it is Mommsen, 

i. 24. 
rather true that they "surrendered their 

personal will for the sake of freedom, and 
learnt to obey their fathers, that they might 
know how to obey the State," although, Ibid., i. 31. 
*Mn such subjection as this, individual 
developement might be arrested, and the 
germs of the fairest promise in man might 
be arrested in the bud." It is very note- 
worthy from this point of view, that the 
centralising influence of Delphi, if not 
originating in Dorian ideas, was at least 
extended by Dorian energy. Prof. Curtius 
holds that the Dorian idea of a state was 
formed by the action of the Delphic priest* 
hood. Whether this was the case, or 
whether it was external pressure that 
welded the Dorians into greater unity than 
was ever attained by the looser Ionian 
city-federations, may be left uncertain. It 
is clear that throughout the period of the 
prime of Hellas, there was a very close 
connection and sympathy between the Del- 



8 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

Cp. MiUler's phic authorities and the leading Dorian 

Dorians, iu . , . * r i c^ ^ 

241. States. And, m spite of the Spartan 

xenelasy, it is probable that the link of 
union lay in common Panhellenic tenden- 
cies. At any rate we find the great 
Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian 
games all celebrated in Dorian territory, 

Curtius, ii, and in honour of deities distinctively or 
27-29. 

especially Dorian. 

The spartan The key to the right understanding of 

institutions, 

the Spartan institutions lies m regarding 
See K. F. them as the old Dorian laws and customs 
arguments modified under the pressure of exceptional 
?irote. Pbto, Conditions. The current traditions repre- 
'"• 309- sented the conquest of Laconia as rapid 

and complete. But this is sufficiently dis- 
proved, not only by isolated fragments of 
MuWer, book information which are wholly inconsistent 

!• CC« IL '\ 

with any such view, but also by consider- 
ing the nature of the case. The Spartans to 
the end of their history were confessedly very 
unskilful in the attack of fortified places ; 
and, indeed, how was it possible that their 
phalanx of spearmen, irresistible in the 
open field, should be equally adapted to 
scale the Acro-Corinthus or the Argive 



THE POSITION OF SPARTA, q 

Larisa? It cannot be doubted that the 
Dorians of Sparta carried on for years, 
and it may be for generations, a kind of 
c7reT€ixar/xos against the surrounding Achaean 
towns. Hence their distinguishing belief 
in the absolute right of the state to the 
unconditional obedience of its citizens, 
must have been intensified by the know^ 
ledge that this unhesitating devotion was 
simply needful for self-preservation. Sparta Cp. Ar. Pol. 

ii. 9, 2. ot 

was a garrison planted in the midst of EtXwrtc . . 
enemies, and its laws and habits were pevovrfc toTq 
those of a garrison. That every citizen diareXovctv. 
should be trained to the highest perfection 
of physical condition and discipline was 
an essential requisite of their position. 
And when the supremacy of Sparta over 
Amyclae, Aegys, Pharis, and Helos had 
once been established, not less vigilance 
and energy were needed to retain it. The 
Achaean population was crushed, but not 
exterminated* Mutatis mutandis^ the posi- 
tion of the Spartans was not unlike that 
which the English have for a century held 
in India. In our own case the maintenance 
of empire is aided by a more advanced 



10 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

material civilisation, and by a still more 
marked superiority of national character. 
But the Dorian invaders were probably 
decidedly inferior to the Achaean s in the 
arts of peace, and distinctions of race, 
though of course existing, were of much 
less importance than is the case as between 
the Englishman and the Bengali. But 
the needful conditions for the rule of a 
nation by a small body of foreigners are 
a proud consciousness on the part of the 
rulers that, man for man, they are im- 
measurably superior to the subject race, 
and an unhesitating daring, ready in times 
of trial to fling itself upon unnumbered 

enemies ^^ <l>poyrjjJiari. fxovov dAAa Kol Kora^fipovrjfJbaTi, 

Like the slave-priest of Aricia, Sparta 

held her national life only so long as she 

proved herself stronger in battle than all 

Compare the who might come against her. And as the 

words of 

Brasidas : chance of a struggle was always imminent, 

Thuc. iv. 126; 

Ar. Pol. ii. 9, every one of her citizens was kept in per- 

feet training for it. 
Lycurgus. That Lycurgus had a real historical 

Thiriwali, existence hardly admits of doubt. But it 

i. 338; Cur- . t , . , n 

tins, i. iQi. IS ailncult to determine what amount of 



ZrCURGUS. II 

originality may be ascribed to his legisla- 
tion. On the whole it seems most probable 
that he did little more than revive and 
place under a strong religious sanction 
the ancient laws and institutions of the 
Dorians, adapting them in a few par- 
ticulars to the peculiar position of the 
Spartans. This is the view of Bishop 
Thirlwall, accepted on the whole by Cur- 
tius.* The basis of all his reforms, as 
Plutarch tells us, was his system of 
national education. But here we must piut. Lye. 14. 
digress for a moment to limit the appli- 
cation of the term. In Sparta as in 
Athens, and indeed throughout Hellas, the 
phrase bore a very different meaning from 
that which is happily attached to it in 
modem times. In Sparta there were at 
most nine thousand families of citizens, 

I am speaking of course with reference mainly to the 
social institutions of Lycurgus. There is force in the argu- 
ments by which Curtius endeavours to show that part of the 
political constitution was distinctly Achaean. But it is sur- 
prising to find him ignoring the irrefragable evidence by 
which Grote has disproved the tradition of an equal division 
of land. To the whole system of Sparta Grote is disposed 
to attribute more originality and a more exceptional posi- 
tion than most other authorities will allow. Compare his 
History, and especially his *• Plato," vol. iii. 309, note x. 



1 2 EDUCA TION IN SPARTA, 

surrounded by more than three times as 
many Perioeci, and a Helot population, 
amounting on the whole at least to two 
Muller, ii. 45. hundred and fifty thousand. In Attica, 
with its population of half a million, at 
least four-fifths of the whole were slaves. 
Bockh. Publ. But of anything like a public education 
c. 7. of slaves, or even of Perioeci, there could 

never have been a question in Hellas. 
The " nation ** then, in the eyes of a Greek, 
would only consist of the free population, 
possessing the full civic rights — Aristotle 
even excludes the "base mechanicals" 
[PavawToi] from his ideal state — and there- 
fore the term "national education" must 
be taken in the limited sense of the educa- 
tion of that small minority of the whole 
community which was recognised as form- 
ing the nation. But to resume : the aim of 
Lycurgus was to train the citizens of Sparta 
to the greatest possible e£5ciency in war. 
To this every other object was unsparingly 
sacrificed. Plato says in his Laws (i. 630 d) 
iroMTo. rd r €v AoKtBatfwyi koI tcl t^Sc irpos tov 
iroXc/tov fJioXvorra ^AeVovras AvKwpyov T€ koL McVct> 

rl$€<r$<u Ta vo/it/to. On the means which he 



OUR AUTHORITIES. 13 

employed to obtain this result we have, Ourautiiori. 

ties. 

fortunately, ample and trustworthy in- 
formation. It is true that the writings of 
Plutarch require to be used with caution. 
Living, as he did, long after the time 
when Sparta had ceased to have any 
independent national life, his facts are of 
course given us only on second-hand 
authority. And Mr. Grote has pointed 
out another less patent source of possible 
error. The abortive attempts at re- 
form made by Agis and Cleomenes not 
only had failed to restore the primitive 
Spartan constitution, but also had caused 
the new ideas which their enthusiasm or 
their policy had announced as constituent 
parts of the Lycurgan institutions to be 
accepted by later historians as really such. 
Plutarch has undoubtedly misled us on 
the question of the equal distribution of 
the land; and it would be rash to use 
without suspicion any assertion of his that 
is unsupported by better authorities. Iso- 
crates, though a contemporary authority 
for the period which we have especially 
to consider, is of little value, because of 



14 EDUCA TWN IN SPARTA, 

the strong hostility to the Lacedaemonians 

Cp. Pancgr. which appears in his writings. But Xeno- 
\\ 110-132. 

phon and Aristotle can be trusted with 

less reserve. The AaK<Sat/xonW IloXcrcta of 

Cp. Wciske's the former has been suspected both in 

dissertation 

prefixed to ancient and in modem times, but the 

Schneider's 

edition. arguments against it do not appear to be 

strong; and the tone of the treatise is 
just what would be expected from the 
friend of Agesilaus and the exile of 
Scillus. There is an evident tendency to 
apologise for Spartan customs and to 
prefer them to those of Athens; and 
though this of itself would not be sufficient 
to prove the authorship, for it became the 
fashion to write in this style in the Attic 
schools of philosophy, yet it tends to con- 
firm the opinion which we should form 
from external evidence. In the case of 
Aristotle, we have unfortunately lost his 
noXtTCiot, in which he gathered the material 
which was employed in his extant treatise 

Cp. Zellcr, ii. '»'» IIoXtnKa ; but in the latter work we have 
not only most instructive criticisms, but 
also, incidentally, very valuable informa- 
tion on the Spartan laws and customs. 



MARRIAGE, 15 

The authority of both Xenophon and 

Aristotle has been impugned by Manso, Spana I. ii. 

69. 
on the ground that neither was himself a 

Spartan; but the former can have been 
little less familiar with Spartan institutions 
than a native citizen, while the careful 
accuracy of Aristotle is surely beyond the 
possibility of censure. It is to these two 
writers, therefore, supplemented by the 
somewhat numerous allusions in the Laws 
of Plato, that we shall have mainly to 
look for guidance. 

The absolute right of the State to dispose Authority of 
of its members as seemed to it best was 
not allowed to remain a theory at Sparta. 
From their birth through all the successive 
stages of infancy, childhood, youth, and 
manhood, its authority never ceased to be 
seen and felt. In fact it may be said to 
have commenced even before their appear- 
ance in the world ; for it was the ^tate 
which determined what marriages should 
be sanctioned or forbidden. The numerous Xcn. de Rep. 
regulations as to the time, the manner^ Aristotle quite 
and the place of marriage, ascribed by tibSToSroi. 
Xenophon to Lycurgus, all had for their 16. * *^' ^^^'^ 



i6 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

object the production of the healthiest and 
most vigorous offspring ; and so far was 
this desire for cvyovta carried, that, if our 
authorities do not mislead us, practices the 
most revolting, fatal to the nobler aspects 
of marriage, were deliberately permitted in 
MuUer, ii. Order to secure it. Miiller endeavours to 
301. . ^^^^ ^^ Dorian idea of marriage by com- 
paring it with the views current in Ionian 
countries, and he is probably right in his 
comparative estimate ; but he is obliged to 
confess that at Sparta marriage was con- 
sidered mainly "as a public institution, 
in order to rear up a strong and healthy 
Vol. i. 105 progeny to the nation." Plutarch tells 
K- ^^L.t ^f us that " new-bom children were carried at 

J^XpOSUt £ Of 

children. once to Certain tryers, who were elders of 
the tribe to which the child belonged. 
Their business was to view the infant care- 
fully, and if they found it stout and well- 
made, they gave order for its rearing, and 
allotted to it one of the nine thousand 
shares of land for its maintenance: but 
if they found it puny and ill-shaped, they 
ordered it to be taken to what was called 
the Apothetae, a sort of chasm under 



EXPOSURE OF CHILDREN. 17 

Taygetus, as thinking it neither for the 
good of the child itself, nor for the public 
interest, that it should be brought up if it 
did not, from the very outset, appear made 
to be healthy and vigorous/' This fact 
rests, I believe, only on the authority of 
Plutarch, and some of the details are 
probably inaccurate. For instance, the 
allotment of one share of land stands or 
falls with the theory of an equal distribu- 
tion of property by Lycurgus, which Mr. 
Grote has so brilliantly disproved : but the 
general fact of the destruction of deformed 
or weakly children may very well be true.* 
Plato (Rep. vi. 460 b), and Aristotle 
(Pol. iv. (vii.) 16, 15), both give their 
sanction to it; and it seems to have' been 
commonly allowed, if not approved, in 
Hellas.f Some, however, have inter- 
preted the * putting away * (dTro^co-ts) to mean 

* Thirl wall does not doubt it, i. 372. 

t On the question how far the arbitrary exposure of chil- 
dren was generally practised and approved there are some 
valuable remarks by K. F. Hermann in " Charikles," ii. 
5 (2nd edition). It is noteworthy that at Thebes (but 
apparently there alone) it was expressly forbidden by law, 
and provision was made by the State for the support of 
those children whose parents were unable to keep tliem. Cp. 
Aelian. ,Var. Hist. ii. 7, and Ussing, op. cit. p. 21, 



i8 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

simply that such infants were exposed in 

the villages of the Perioeci, and grew up 

among them, excluded from the "military 

Curtius, i. 202. brotherhood " of the Spartans. Up to the 

Training of age of seven years, children were left to the 

young chit- 

'dren. care of their mothers or of nurses ; but the 

rigorous discipline under which they were 
to spend their lives began at once. Swad- 
dling bands were discarded, and they grew 
up unfettered in limb; their food was 
plain, and not too plentiful ; and Plutarch 
adds the hardly credible information that 
they were "not afraid in the dark, or of 
being left alone, without any peevishness 
or ill-humour or crying.*' We cannot 
wonder that Spartan nurses, if they really 
secured this, "were often bought up or 
hired by people of other countries,'' as, for 

Piut. Lycurg. instance, by the parents of Alcibiades.* A 

1 6. 

glimpse at the brighter side of the chil- 
KaXa^iov dren's life is given us by the well-known 
Piut. Ages, 25. Story ot iigesilaus ridmg on a stick to 

* Schomann, Griech. Altertli. i. 265 (note 2), quotes 
another instance of a Laconian nurse at Athens, in Mahcha 
of Cythera, nurse to the children of Diogiton. Her tomb 
has been recently discovered in Athens. Cp. Bulletino di 
corrisp. Archeol. 1841, p. 56. 



TRAINING OF BOYS. 19 

amuse his little ones ; and to a Dorian, if 
not to a Spartan, the philosopher Archytas, 
is ascribed the credit of the invention of 
the rattle (TrXarayr;,) "which they give to 
children, in order that having the use of 
this they may not break any of the things 
in the house : for little creatures cannot 
keep still/' At seven years of age boys Arist. Pol. v. 
were taken irom their parents, and the 
regular education (ay^yi}) by the State com- 
menced. Xenophon contrasts the custom state educa- 
of the other Greeks in this respect with ' 
that of the Spartans ; for while the 
former, as soon as the children could 
understand what was said to them, placed 
them in charge of a slave called the 
watSaywyos, and Sent them oif with him to 
schoolmasters, Lycurgus chose as their 
master one of the most eminent of the 
citizens, to whom he assigned the office 
of 7rai5oi/o/xos. The boys were divided into 
bands called dycXat, or in the Laconian 
dialect /Jomt, and over each of these was a 
Povdyopy chosen from the youths who were 
just entering manhood, who acted as the 
captain of the band. All, rich and poor 



20 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

alike, were subjected to the same rigid 
discipline, and did their exercises and 
took their play together. A specific quan- 
tity of food was allotted to each ; but this 
was intentionally barely sufficient for them, 
in order that they might learn to do with 
Xen. Rep. as little as possible.* At the same time 

Lac. c. 2. 

they were encouraged to steal whatever 
they could, as being so best prepared 
for military service, "for evidently one 
who is to play the thief, must watch 
by night and deceive by day, lie in am- 
bush, ay, and supply himself with spies, 
Cp. Gellius, if he is to get anything." But any one who 

xi. i8, 17. 

was detected in stealing was beaten se- 
verely for his clumsiness in not learning 
aptly, as Xenophon says, the lesson which 
it was intended to teach him. There was 
Flogging. a strange practice of Sta/iao-Ttywo-ts, accord- 
ing to which boys were flogged severely 
at the altar of Artemis Orthia, and vied 
with each other in bearing the blows 
without a murmur, even though they 

* Athenaeus, an uncritical and somewhat doubtful au- 
thority, tells us (xii. 12) that leanness was so much admired 
at Sparta, that the boys were inspected every ten days, and 
any one who seemed too fat was whipped. 



TRAINING OF BOYS, 21 

sometimes died under the suffering. This 
was probably first adopted as a substitute 
for human sacrifices;* a view which is 
supported by the fact that it lasted down 
to the days of Cicero (Tusc. Disp. ii. 34), 
Plutarch (Lycurg. p. 108), and even Pau- 
sanias (iii. 16, 6, 7). Plutarch, indeed, 
assures us that he had himself seen several 
of the youths endure whipping to death. 
Whatever its origin, it was taken advantage 
of by the Spartan legislator to strengthen 
the contempt of pain, which it was one 
of his principal objects to implant. For Dress. 
the same reason boys till their twelfth 
year were only allowed to wear a single 
sleeveless chiton, exchanged as they ad- 
vanced in years for a plain rough cloak, 
which served them all the year round. 
They commonly went barefooted, and 
often stripped entirely for their games. 
In all their amusements, as well as their 
exercises, they were constantly under the 
eyes of the older men ; and we are told 
that the latter delighted to stir up quarrels 

* Cp. Preller, " Griechische Mythologie,'* i. 240 (2nd 
edition). 



22 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

and disputes among them,- "to have a 
good opportunity of finding out their dif- 
ferent characters, and of seeing which 
would be valiant, which a coward, when 
they should come to more dangerous en- 
Trahiingof counters." From their twelfth year their 

von t hi. 

training increased in severity; and the 
several stages between this date and that of 
manhood, which was fixed at thirty years, 
were marked by different names, corre- 
sponding, probably, though we cannot 
determine the point exactly, to changes 
in their forms of education.* The little 
bands (TXat, subdivisions of the povat men- 
tioned above) slept together on beds of 
rushes, which they gathered by the banks 
of the Eurotas; and to train the bo5^s to 
greater hardihood, no knives were allowed 
Hunting. to be used for cutting them. The favourite 
amusement was hunting, for which the 
mountain-forests of Laconia gave abundant 
facilities, and the Spartan hounds were pro- 
verbially famous. But the game seems 
always to have been pursued on foot ; for 

* mdii'vai, ^iWtlpivtg, dptvig, er^aipiTg. Cp. Miiller, ii. 



THE CRYPTEIA. 



25 



Xenoplion, in his enthusiastic treatise called 
Kw7;y€TtKos, makes no mention of horses, nor 
does he speak of their use in hunting in his 
book TTcpt tTTTTiK^s. The evidence on which 
Miiller says that "riding was one of the 
principal occupations of the youths of 
Sparta/' is very slight and untrustworthy, 
especially in the face of the admitted in- 
feriority of the Lacedaemonian cavalry.* In 
fact, Miiller himself points out elsewhere 
that a preference for cavalry, according to 
the principles of antiquity, was a proof of an 
unstable and effeminate character, exactly 
the reverse of that exhibited by the heavy- 
armed soldiery of the Lacedaemonians. 
On the other hand, I think that we may The Crypteia. 
fairly accept the explanation which he 
gives of the much-abused Kpvirrday an in- 
stitution which, in the way in which Plu- 
tarch (Lye. 28) describes it, is simply 
incredible. Megillus, the Spartan inter- Cp. Grote, ii. 
locutor in Plato's Laws, speaks as follows : ^^' 

* The expression of Xenoplion (Hell. vi. 4, 10) is quali- 
fied : toIq de AaKtdaifioviotg kot' Ikhvov rbv xpovov ttovij- 
porarov t/v to iTTTriicoi', and therefore should not have been 
referred to by ^Mr. Mason in his careful article on Exercitus 
(Greek) in Diet. Ant. to prove the point ; but the general 
fact is unquestioned. Cp. Miiller, ii. 257, 



24 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 



** There is, too, the so-called Crypteia, 
or secret service, in which wonderful en- 
durance is shown ; those who are employed 
in this wander over the whole country by 
day and by night, and even in winter 
have not any shoes on their feet, and are 
without beds to lie on, and have no one 
to attend them " (p. 633 b). We may fairly 
view this in the light of another pas- 
sage where the philosopher, speaking in 
the character of the Athenian, describes 
the services which he will require of 
the " wardens of the country " (dypovo/Aot) : 
"Further at all seasons of the year, 
summer and winter alike, let them survey 
minutely the whole country, bearing 
arms and keeping guard, at the same 
time acquiring a perfect knowledge of 
every locality. For there can be no more 
important kind of information than the 
exact knowledge of a man*s own country; 
and for this, as well as for more general 
reasons of pleasure and advantage, hunt- 
ing with dogs and other kinds of sports 
should be pursued by the, young. The 
service to whom this is committed may 



n 



THE CRYPTEIA. 25 

be called the secret police [K/ovTrrotJ, or 
wardens of the country; the name does 
not much signify, but every one who has 
the safety of the State at heart will use 
his utmost diligence in this service" 
(p. 763 a.b). Mr. Jowett justly notices Vol. iv. p. 21 
that the crypteia, as well as the public 
education, is borrowed by Plato from 
Sparta. It is not unfair, then, to suppose 
that at least the main objects of this 
** secret service" were those on which 
Plato lays most stress, that the young 
Spartans might obtain an intimate know- 
ledge of their own country for military 
purposes; and that their frames might 
be hardened by exposure and vigorous 
exercise. Of course it is easy to believe 
that if, while ranging through the land, 
they found any traces of conspiracy, or 
even disaffection, among the Helots, they 
might resort to severe and treacherous 
means of repression; but /this is a very 
different thing from Pluja^ch's view, which 
makes it out to have* been a legalised 
system of gratuitous assassination.* So 

• Cramer, in his *• Geschichte der Erziehung," a book 



26 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 



I 

^ 



Tusc. ii. 14, Cicero writes : " Leges Lycurg'i laboribus 
34. 

erudiunt iuventutem venando, currendo, 

esuriendo, sitiendo, algendo, aestuando." 

And no more than a constant vigilance need 

be understood by the words of Thucydides 

(iv. 80-2) del yop to, TroXXa AaKcSat/iov/ois wpos tovs 
EtAwra? T^Js <f>vXaKrjs Tripi {jAXiara /ca^eo'T'^KCt. 

Fights. Xhe words of Megillus immediately pre- 

ceding those already quoted — to ttc/oi ras 

Legg. p. 633 KapTcp-qaeus rdv aXyeh6v(MV iroXv irap rjfxLV yiyvofxevov 

iv Tats TT/oos dAAT/Xovs Tats x^P^^ /xd'^^aL's — contam a 
reference to a custom which is described 
by Cicero (Tusc. Disp, v. 27, 77) as exist- 
ing in his own days : " Adolescentium greges 
Lacedaemone vidimus ipsi incredibili con- 
tentione certantis pugnis, calcibus, un- 
guibus, morsu denique, cum exanimarentur 
jii. 14, 8 ; prius quam victos se faterentur." Pausanias 
fjdxovTai c£ gives a still more highly-coloured descrip- 
tion, from v/hich it appears that no act 
of violence was spared to gain the victory 
Tovg6^9a\- ^j^ these ferocious contests* which were 

fjovg avTo- ' 

pvcrarovai. 

that requires to be used with much caution, identifies the 
KpvTrrtia with the legalisation of /cXottt/, but he is probably 
only following Miiller somewhat carelessly. 

* Mr. Jowett's translation of Plato's expression by 
•♦ certain hand-to-hand fights," if not positively incorrect, is 



Kai tv %fpff«. 
Kal ifjLTrrioun'- 
reg Xa^, oaK- 

VOVtTl Tt Kni 



EDUCATION OF BOYS, 27 

carried on in an island called Platanistas, 

devoted to the purpose. It is curious, after 

reading Pausanias's description of the 

biting and kicking that were sanctioned, 

the bleeding faces and the eyes torn from 

their sockets, to turn to Miiller's comment 

that " every unprejudiced reader " must 

consider it "proved satisfactorily that the 

chief object of Spartan discipline was to 

invigorate the bodies of the youth, without 

rendering their minds at the same time 

either brutal or ferocious ! '* We are much Vol. li. p. 327. 

more inclined to sav, with Aristotle, that Pol. v. (viii.) 

the Spartans were rendered brute-like by 

their hardships [p\ Aa/cwcs OrjpiwB^t^ aTrepyd^ovrai, 

TOtS TTOVOtS.) 

But we must pass from the general Education of 

the boys. 

training and discipline of the Spartan boys 
to their education, in the narrower sense 
of the term. In the eyes of every Greek, 
education had to deal with three main 

subjects YpdfMfxaTaj [lovo'tKrj and ra iv irctXata^rpay 

though often the first and second were 
grouped together under the common name 

likely to mislead a reader. The essential point is that no 
weapons were allowed but fists, nails, and teeth. 



28 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 



1 



Gymnastics. \ of ^ovdiKy],^^ To gymnastic exercises the 
Spartans were passionately devoted, and 
regarded them, with war and the chase, 

Cp. Plutarch, as the only occupations fit for a freeman. 

i. Ii6 

(Clough). But here a distinction must be sharply 
drawn between gymnastic exercises and 
the elaborate training of gymnasts. The 
ancients never failed to mark the differ- 
ence, and the Romans, much as they 
practised the exercises of the Campus 
Martius, looked with entire disapproval, 
mingled with contempt, upon professional 
athletes. t Gymnasia, such as abounded in 
the other Hellenic states, were unknown 
in Sparta, and it was rare indeed to find 
a Spartan distinguishing himself, except in 

* Cp. Xen. de Rep. Lac. c. 2. evBvg Sk irknTrovviv els 
SidatTKoXwv, fta6t)(TOfikvovg xal ypafXfiara, kuI fiovtriKtiv Kai 
rd iv TcaKaiaTpq. : Plat. Alcib. i. 106 E. efiaOtg yap ypa/tt- 
fiara Kai KiOapiZiiv Kai TraXaisiv. Theages 122 E. oifK 
iciid^aTo at 6 rraTrjp Kai iTraidevoev airep kvOdSe 01 aWoi 
iriiraidevvTai oi ruiv KaXuiv KayaQCov Trartpwv vUtf, olov 
ypafifiard re xai xiOapi^tiv Kai TraXaitiv Kai rijv dWriv 
dy(i)viav ; 

t Cp. the passages from Plutarch, Seneca, and Silius 
quoted by Becker and K. F. Hermann in Charikles, ii. 
162-164. The diiFerence between gymnastics and the train- 
ing of athletes is well brought out by Jacobs in his eloquent 
lecture (Vermischte Schriften, iii. 2, 18): " Erziehung der 
Hellenen zur Sittlichkeit." Cp. also Prof. Mayor's notes 
on Quintilian X. 



GYMNASTICS. 29 

certain forms of competition, in the great 
athletic festivals. Plutarch gives a curious 
reason for the prohibition of some kinds 
of gymnastic contests at Sparta. " Lycur- 
gus," he tells us, " being asked what sort of 
martial exercises or combats he approved 
of," answered, **A11 sorts, except that in 
which you stretch out your hands,*' that is 
acknowledge yourself defeated ; because 
it was held to be unworthy of a Spartan 
to ask for quarter, even in a peaceful en- 
counter. But a more probable reason is 
to be found in the fact that the special 
excellence required for distinction in any 
particular kind of gymnastics interfered 
with that perfect developement of all the 
physical powers which proved of most 
service in war. Euripides, though no Cp. Paley, 

r • 1 r* 1 • . , Euripides, i. 

friend to Spartans or their ways, certainly p. xx. 
expresses Spartan views in the curious frag- 
ment cited from his AvtoA-vkos by Athenaeus : 
(Frag. 284 Dind.) 

riq yap TraXaifrag ev, rig wkvttovs avrjp The whole 

ri SiiTKOv dpag ri yvdOov Traiaag KoKCjg fragment (28 

TToXei iraTpuia ar'^tbavov riOKeatv XaBwv ; ^"Z 

^^\ r '5- , '^ J worth com- 

iroTtpa f-iaxovvrai TroXifxioKTiv tv x^po^v paring, from 

diffKovg txovrej; ?) Six' OLairiSwv iroai this point of 

QtivovTtg tK^aXovci iroXeniovg Trdrpag ; view. 



50 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

Gymttasts. The fulness of flesh (TroXvo-apKia) with which 

we find gymnasts often taunted, was quite 
opposed to the spare and slender "good 
condition " c^e^'ta, which, as we have seen 
above, was especially aimed at by the 
Lacedaemonians. The disproportionate 
strengthening of the legs of runners and 
the shoulders of boxers which Sokrates 
blames in Xenophon's Symposium (il. 17), 
would be equally disapproved by them ; and 
the careful attention to food and drink 
(though not always according to the rules 
of modern " training ") which was required 
of athletes, would have run counter to 
the first principles of Spartan education. 
Hence, just as we are told of Philopoemen 
by Plutarch,* that he put a stop, as far 
as he could, to athletics in Achaea, so the 
Lacedaemonians refused to sanction any 
special gymnastic training. "They ap- 
pointed no masters to instruct their boys 
in wrestling, that they might contend, not 
in sleights of art and little tricks, but in 

* oh [iovov avTOQ i(pvys to Trpayfia Kal Kartyikaaiv, dWd 
rat CTpanjywv vartpov art/iint^ Kai TrpoTrrjXuKifffioXg, oaov 
ijtf 67r' avT(fJ, "Traoav dQ\r](Jiv i^i[3a\ev bjg rd xp^<'''/*w^«^« 
Tutp aufioiTUiV dg rovg dvayKaiovg dydvag axp»?orra iroioixiav. 



BOXING. 31 

strength and courage/' It is a little per- Plutarch, 

Apophth. 

plexing to find, in the face of Plutarch's Lac. (vol. i. p. 

434 Goodwin). 

repeated statements that JLycurgus for- 
bade boxing as an exercise,* that in 
Plato (Protag. 342 B) the Laconizers in 
the various Greek towns "get their ears 
battered in boxing,'' in imitation of the 
Spartans, " and bind the cestus round their 
arms, and are devoted to gymnastics 
and wear short cloaks, just as though it 
were by means of these things that the 
Lacedaemonians were masters of Greece." 
But, as in other passages where the 
** Laconomania" is mentioned, f there is 
no reference to gymnastics, it is possible 
that Plato had in his eye certain individual 
Laconizers whose zeal outstripped their 
knowledge, and who were no more to be 
taken as fair representatives of Spartan 
customs, than some Anglomaniac devotees 
of le sport are to be considered as repro- Rep. Lac iv. 
ducing the field of the Pytchley or the 
Quom. The boxing of which Xenophon 

* Plutarch, Lye. 19. Reg. Apophth. 125. Lac. Apophth. 
225 (Miiller, ii. 320). 

t Cp. Aristoph. Av. 1282 (with Kock's note). Demosth. 
in Con. 1267. Plut. Phoc. 10, 



32 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

speaks does not appear to have been an 
exercise, but an angry fight. Gladiators, 
too (oTrXojxaxoL), Were forbidden at Sparta,* 
partly because the legislator does not 
seem to have wished to encourage their 
special training, but also, we may well 
believe, because the use of arms was 
thought too serious a thing to be allowed 
for mere amusement. But all gymnastic 
exercises which had for their object the 
harmonious developement of all the bodily 
powers were pursued w4th eagerness. In 

Wrestling. Wrestling especially they excelled, and 
Xenophon tells us that they were noted 
for all forms of it alike, though it is not 

Cp. Rep. Lac. easy to identify the various descriptions 

vi. 9, with i_ • 1 , . 

Schneider's which he mentions. All their exercises 
were carried on under the eyes, not only 
of their appointed superintendent, but also 
of as many of the older citizens as chose 
to be present, and the emulation thus 
inspired was regarded as one of the most 
powerful motives that could be brought 

* Plato Laches, 183 B. rot.? Iv SttXoic ftaxofihovg lyj, 
TovTovg opu, TTJv iilv AaKtdaifiova y'lyov/xsvovg dvai d^arov 
itpbv Kai oidi liKpt^t xodi iirij3aivopTaQ, k.t.X. 



note. 



CHORIC DANCES. ^i 

to bear upon the youthful warrior. By 
this means also boys, in what might be 
considered their hours of amusement, were 
made to feel the continual presence of a 
restraining power ; — for every adult citizen 
was regarded as possessing a father's full 
authority over the children of the State, an 
authority which, in the absence of the usual 
Paedonomus, he might enforce by blows, xen. Rep. 
And as most of these exercises seem to vi. 2. 
have been performed by the troops (TXat) 
together and under a common command, 
they must have greatly tended to produce 
the effect at which the Spartan education 
was always aiming, to lead the individual 
citizen to feel himself always closely en- 
com.passed by a system of rigid rules, and 
as nothing in himself, except so far as he 
formed a unit in a perfect whole. 

The same sense of ** solidarity " viwx.'sX. ch(»ic dances. 
have been powerfully strengthened by the 
choral dances, which were constantly prac- 
tised. The broad distinction between the cp. Curtius, 
passionate outpourings of the fiery Lesbian 
school and the grave high choric songs 
of Alcman and Terpsichorus bears witness 

D 



34- EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

to a deep distinction between the tribes 
for whom they wrote. And the contrast 
is not less great between the iambics an( 
elegiacs of the Ionian bards and the spirit 
stirring paeans and hyporchemes that wer 
welcome in Lacedaemon. As "the vitc 
principle of the Lacedaemonian constitutio 
was harmony, a complete unity of interes' 
and feeling among the members of tl 
privileged class, an absorption in fac 
to this extent, of the individual in tl 

Mure, iii. 47. mass," SO the powerful aid given to tb' 
by the song and dance of the chorus cou 
not be overlooked. The graceful a: 
ordered motion of the body in the dar 
was of itself no slight assistance to militc 
training;* but the habit of acting rapic' 
in numbers in obedience to a leader mur..t 
have been of still more value. Hence we 
are prepared to find the origin of the 

Cp. Plato, Pyrrhich dance attributed to Sparta ; and 

Legg. 796B, '' ^ 

and other although Other authorities gave different 

authorities in 

Miiller,ii.349. accounts On this point, it is certain that 

* Cp. the poet Socrates (apud Athen. xiv. p. 628), sup- 
posed by Miiller (ii. 342 n.) to be the philosopher. 

oV It xopoii; KaWiaTa 6iovg rtfiuKTiv, dpiaroi Iv 7ro\«/iy. 



MENTAL AND MORAL TRAINING. 35 

it was nowhere so long* and ardently 

li|ractised. Lucian describes a dance of 

le Spartan ephebi, in which they were 

mged in rows one behind another, and 

anced to the music of the flute, first 

ilitary and then choral dances, chanting 

vocations to Aphrodite, or exhortations Lucian de 

Salt., 10, ir. 

idressed to each other. In the Gymnopae- Cp. Mure, iii. 

a the combination of gymnastic exercises 

d mimetic dances seems to have reached 

. fullest developement ; and for this time 

dy the customary exclusiveness of Sparta 

.s relaxed, for we hear of great numbers 

strangers flocking from all parts to see Xen. Mem. 

r . . rr., r . 2, 61, &C. 

\ festivities. The op/Aos was a favourite 

ace, in which youths and girls joined 

"'ether, linking hand in hand. 

»ut the subject of the choral dances Music. 

naturally leads us to the second great 

branch of a Spartan education, that wfiich 

was concerned with the mental and moral 

training of the children ; for the music 

and song with which the dance was accom*- 

panied formed one of the most important 

* Athenaeus says that it was danced at Sparta in his own 
time (circ. a.d. 230). 



36 EDUCA TION IN SPARTA . 

elements in this. It is not needful for the 
present purpose that we should plunge into 
the technical and complicated mysteries 
of ancient Greek music. It is sufficient 
for us to note that music was ever regarded 
among the ancients — and especially among 
the Greeks — as possessing a very powerful 
moral influence for good or evil. The 
music that should be allowed at Sparta 
was subject to the severest official control : 
while all the citizens were trained to take 
their part in the choric songs, the measures 
to which these should be set were strictly 
limited to grave and simple strains. The 
Dorian style was always the favourite one,* 
though other styles do not appear to 
have been forbidden. But when a player 
named Phr}''nis attempted to perform on 
a lyre with more than the lawful number 
of strings, one of the ephors at once de- 

♦ As able aKovovTa^ SiariOeaOai KaOeffrriKOTus fiaXiara 
irpbg (Ttpav (Ar. Pol. v. 6, 22). " The Dorian mode created 
a settled and deliberate resolution, exempt alike from the 

desponding and from the impetuous sentiments The 

marked ethical effects produced by these modes in ancient 
times are facts perfectly well attested, however difficult they 
may be to explain on any general theory of music." — Grote, 
«' History," ii. 190. 



MUSIC. 37 

stoyed the superfluous chords. A similar 
story is told of Timotheus, but it rests on 
very doubtful evidence. Aristotle remarks Cp. Porson in 

■1 1 o .^1111 t^s Museum 

that the Spartans, " though they do not criticum, vol. 
learn, are yet able to judge correctly, as *' ^" ^ 
they assert, what strains are good and what 

are not good : *' ov /xav^dvovrcs oyMi% hvva.vro.1 
KpCvtLV 6p$&s, u)S <l>a(Ti, TO. )(pr)(TTa KoX ra firj )(pr)(TTa. 

Twv /AcXiov (Pol. V. (viii.) 5, 7) ; but this assertion 
of their neglect of the study of music must 
evidently be taken with some limitation : 
either he is thinking of skill in playing 
musical instruments, in which case his 
remark may well be true of the great Cp. Grote, iii. 

73 ; Dorians, 

majority of the citizens ; or it may be, as ii. 342. 
Miiller supposes, that in Aristotle's time, 
" the number of the citizens in Sparta 
was so greatly diminished, and war occu- 
pied so much of the public attention, 
that the favourable side of Spartan dis- 
cipline was cast into the shade." But 
the former supposition is the more pro- 
bable ; for the choric songs of the Spar- 
tans would naturally require much less 
individual skill in playing instruments 
than the elegies and scolia, which, as we 



38 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

shall hereafter see, were common in the 
Ionian States.* 
Jnteiiectuai Whether the Spartan boys received any 

training. 

Other mental training than that implied in 
the study of their choric songs is a point 
on which our authorities and critics are 
at variance. Mr. Grote speaks of them as 
** destitute even of the elements of letters," 
and bases his opinion mainly upon two 
passages in the Panathenaicus of Isocrates. 
In one of these the fact is directly asserted 

(p. 277)' ovTQi Ze TotTovrov dTrjoXeXeififjivoi ttjq koivyjc 
-TraioiiaQ Koi (f)iXocro(^iai: elalv Hnrre ov^e ypa/ijuara 

fiavddyovaip : in another the belief which 
Isocrates (rightly or wrongly) held is 
shown, Mr. Grote thinks, more unmis- 
takeably, because unconsciously, by the 
words (p. 285): "the most rational Spar- 
tans will approve this discourse, if th^y 
find any one to read it to them." But 
surely if Isocrates was capable of a rhe- 
torical exaggeration, which, as Mr. Grote ' 

* Schomann however (Griechische Alterth. I.* 268) holds 
that they were taught both the lyre and the flute, quoting 
Chamaeleon (apud Athen. iv. 84, p. 184) as an e\adence for 
the latter at any rate ; and rejecting the relevance of the 
anecdote in Plutarch : Apophth, Lac. 39. 



LITERARY CULTURE. 39 

himself allows, deprives his testimony of 
much of its weight, he was capable also 
of the rhetorical artifice of dropping a 
sneer, such as is contained in the second 
passage, in the hope that it would sting 
the more for being apparently so unpre- 
meditated. Nor can we suppose that in 
this ''wonderful effusion of senile self- 
complacency" Isocrates was more careful to Dr. Thomp- 

, . , . - , son, Phaedrus, 

observe historic accuracy than in his elabo- p. 177. 
rate Panegyricus, which teems with blunders 
or exaggerations. Certainly a couple of 
careless phrases, dropped by a garrulous 
rhetorician in his ninety-fifth year, ought 
not to be allowed to outweigh the evidence 
drawn from the constant references in 
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon to 
written letters and treatises, without the 
slightest hint that there was any difi&culty 
in reading them, and from the unbroken 
silence of Plato and Aristotle. Plutarch's 
evidence that Lycurgus taught the Spartans 
letters, " in so far as they were required for 
useful and necessary purposes," may not in 
itself carry great weight ; but the well- 
established practice of using the scytale 



40 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

as a means of communication between 
the Spartan authorities at home and their 
generals and ambassadors, cannot be ex- 
plained away. In short, it appears to me 
that Colonel Mure (Vol. iii. App. K and N) 
has gained a victory over Mr. Grote all 
along the line ; and that we are bound to 
admit at least as much literary culture on the 
part of the Spartans as is implied in the 
words of Plutarch.* But this is confessedly 
very little ; and in all but the taste for choric 
poetry the Spartans must have held as low 
a position in this respect as was ever oc- 
cupied by any semi-civilised nation. 
Moral Their moral training was cared for far 

training* . 

more sedulously, and though its range was 
narrow and defective, within its limits it 
appears, at all events in the better days 
of Sparta, to have been crowned with 
signal success. The virtues which made 
a man an accomplished warrior and a 

• Mr. Grote in his •* Plato " somewhat qualifies the as- 
- sertions made in his History, and asserts only that ♦* the 
public training of youth at Sparta, equal for all the citizens, 
included nothing of letters and music, which in other cities 
were considered to be the characteristics of an educated 
Greekj though probably indi\ddual Spartans, more or fewer, 
acquired these accomplishments for themselves," vol. iii. 
307 ; cp. vol. iii. p. 174. 



MORAL TRAINING. 41 

devoted citizen were impressed upon the 
Spartan boys by all the resources of an 
elaborate system of national education ; 
habits formed from his earliest years, the 
keenest emulation, the most consistent and 
ever-present public opinion, the entire ex- 
clusion of any disturbing element, were all 
brought to bear upon the future citizen to 
make him obedient, frugal, brave, and 
self-denying. And the success of this 
educational policy, so long as the system 
of Lycurgus was preserved in secure iso- 
lation, was complete. All the qualities 
requisite to gain dominion were attained 
as they never have been since. But of the its defects, 
qualities that are needed to make it a 
blessing instead of a curse to the subjects, 
of an enlightened and far-seeing liberality, 
an even-handed justice, a wise and kindly 
tolerance, we nowhere find the existence, 
or the desire for their existence. The ad- 
mirers of Sparta found abundant material 
for their panegyrics. Xenophon delights De Rep. Lac. 
to describe the Spartan youths as " walk- 
ing along the streets with their hands 
folded in their cloaks, proceeding in silence, 



C. 111. 



42 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

looking neither to the right hand nor to 
the left, but with their eyes modestly fixed 
upon the ground. There the male sex 
showed their inherent superiority to the 
female sex, even in modesty. They were 
as silent as statues ; their eyes as im- 
movable as bronzes, their looks more 
shamefast than a maiden in the bridal 
chamber." Plutarch contrasts their brief 
sententiousness and reverence for their 
elders with the loquacity and petulance 
of the Athenian striplings. But we can 
never forget that when the time of trial 
came, and Sparta had wrested the reins 
of empire from Athens, her failure to hold 
them and to guide them wisely was far 
more speedy and ignominious than that 
of her rival. The obedience to law which 
had been inculcated in the vale of the 
Eurotas, was forgotten as soon as the 
Spartan generals passed into a wider field : 
the simplicity and scorn of luxury, which 
the whole of their training had been in- 
tended to produce, was changed into a 
venality and greed for gold almost un- 
paralleled. Brasidas was cut off too soon 



MORAL INFLUENCES. 43 

to show what he might have become, 
but even his brilliant career was tainted 
with scandalous duplicity ; of Agesilaus xhuc. iv. 

122 6. 

we know but little, except from absurdly- 
inflated panegyrics ; but Pausanias, Gy- 
lippus, Lysander, and many others show 
the same fatal weakness in the presence 
of temptation. Rarely has a more mag- 
nificent opportunity been offered to any 
state than that which was given to Sparta 
after the battle of Aegospotami and the 
submission of Athens ; and rarely has 
such an opportunity been more brutally 
and wantonly abused. And the secret of 
it lay in this : that the Spartan national 
education trained citizens for Sparta and ^ 
not for Hellas. The duties of a man to his 
State were diligently taught ; the duties 
of man to man were passed over in silence. Cp. Cramer, 

. , Gcschichte 

How clearly the great philosophical critics der Erzie- 
of Athens perceived these faults we shall note? ' ' 
see hereafter. We must now turn our 
attention to two subsidia of the Spartan 
system of education, which contributed 
powerfully to mould it. The legislator 
fixlly recognised and attempted to regulate 



44 EDUCATION IN SPARTA, 

the influence exerted on the character of 

the young by strong personal attachments, 

Influence of and by the power of woman. The relations 

lovers. 

which commonly existed in Greece between 
a full-grown man and some favourite boy 
present us with a curious and often per- 
plexing subject of inquiry. The question 
is one which must be looked at wholly 
from a Hellenic stand-point. For the 
union of Mediaeval Catholicism with the 
old Teutonic reverence for woman gave 
birth to a spirit of chivalry, which has, 
happily, never died out of the world in 
later days. But the influence of this makes 
it far more difficult for us to throw ourselves 
back in thought into the times when it was 
not yet born. Yet it is certain that to a 
Greek ardent feelings of devoted attach- 
ment to beauty of form and soul were more 
readily excited by a boy than by a woman. 
Cp. the pas- Marriage was regarded as a civic duty : 

sages quoted - , . . 

by Hermann, and the Wife as the mother of legitimate 

Privatalt. , ., , , . . , TT 

p. 232, 2. children : the connection with a Hetaera 
was mainly a matter of sensual pleasure ; 
but it was the passion for a beautiful boy 
that was looked upon as the source of the 



INFLUENCE OF LOVERS. 45 

noblest inspiration, and as the keenest 
spur to glorious deeds. The Phaedrus and 
the Symposium of Plato become intelligible 
to us only as we read them in the light of 
this Hellenic sentiment ; and the accounts Cp. Grote's 

, . , , ^ , , . f. ^ Plato, ii. 206 

which we have of the relation 01 Socrates sqq. The 

- ,., A -I •■« • 1 -1 1 whole subject 

to youths like Alcibiades show us how is discussed 
pure and elevating the attachment might J^.g fuhies^by 
be. It is needless to touch upon the foul chanki'es ii. 
and degrading vices which often attended by^fcobs!^'^ 
it : it is important for our present purpose § ^^ftg^^ 
only to notice that it was neither originally 
nor invariably evil. And so far as we can 
determine from our authorities, the custom, 
as it was observed in Sparta, was wholly 
free from the corruptions which sometimes 
accompanied it in Athens, and which made 
it in Rome the source of the most shame- 
less abominations. The elder Spartan 
citizens were encouraged to link them- 
selves by the closest ties of affection to 
particular boys or youths ; it was regarded 
as disgraceful if a boy found no one to 
take him under his special protection ; and Cp. Cic. apud 

, .- , , - Serv. adVerg. 

it was a reproach to a man 11 he neglected Aen. x. 325. 
this portion of his civic duties. But the 



46 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

names that were given to the lover and the 
loved one bear sufficient witness to the lofty 
conception of their mutual relation. The 
former was called etajrv/yXaf, he whose task 
it was to breathe into the soul of his chosen 
one the spirit of valour and virtue: the 
latter was the diraQ or hearer, who had to 
listen to the words of counsel and en- 
couragement. If a man had entered into 
such a connection, he became responsible 
to the State for the conduct of his protege, 
Lycurg. c. i8. and we are told by Plutarch that a lover 
was fined by a magistrate, because the 
lad whom he loved cried out in a cowardly 
fashion while he was fighting. But to 
allow any sensual taint to enter into this 
Xen. Rep. attachment was considered as extremely 
Cp.ChariWes, disgraceful ; and we are assured by several 

ii. 22 I 22^ ' 

Schomann,' respectable authorities, that no jealousy 

j. 270 • ^^ was felt if one man had several favourites, 

ic. ep. IV. ^^ ^^^ ^^y many lovers. We have no right 

then to regard this feature of the Spartan 
system as anything but the legal recog- 
nition of what was an inspiriting aid to 
the attainment of the standard of virtue 
aimed at. 



RELATION OF THE SEXES. 47 
The same remark is probably true oi influence of 

women. 

the relation of the sexes as established 
by Lycurgus. The main object of the 
training to which he subjected girls as 
well as boys — an object which is stated 
frequently by Xenophon and Plutarch with 
a directness little suited to modern feel- 
ings — was that they might produce vigor- 
ous offspring. To this end he established 
a discipline for girls, of which we have 
but fragmentary notices, but which seems 
to have differed but little from that pre- 
scribed for boys. There was, probably, 
the same division into bands and troops, 
the same constant supervision by a ma- 
gistrate of high rank, the same simple 
fare and scanty dress, the same rigid 
training in gymnastics, dancing, and sing- 
ing. But what excited most astonish- 
ment on the part of the Ionian Greeks, 
accustomed as they were to the seclusion 
of women in the inner chambers, and to 
the long and graceful Ionian xtrutv^ was 
the free mixture of youths and girls in 
the amusements of the games, and the 
exposure of the latter, which was not only 



48 



EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 



sanctioned but encouraged. Plutarch 

speaks as if the girls exercised entirely 

naked, but they seem from other authori- 

Charikles, ii. ties to have wom a axtffToc x^**"*^^' reaching 

Cp. Miiiier's to the knee, and open on either side. In 

Denkm. ii. , , . ^ , , . 

ii8. any case, the object of the lawgiver was 

to train his citizens to such healthy free- 
dom of intercourse with the other sex 
that prurient thoughts might be excluded 
by the absence of any attractive attempts 
at concealment; and that youths and 
maidens might mix together in pure sim- 
plicity. The experiment was hazardous, 
but the unanimous voice of all our au- 
thorities bears witness to its success in 
this instance. The tone of morality at 
Sparta would bear comparison with that 
of any other city of Hellas : we find no 
reference to a class of prostitutes : adul- 
tery was all but unknown, and jealousy 
extremely rare. Love-matches were com- 
mon, and we have several instances of 

Grote, ii. 151; the most devoted conjugal affection. It 

Miiller, ii. 

303-305 ; is true that Aristotle gives a picture far 
from attractive of the luxury, pride, and 
wealth of the Spartan women of his own 



Cp. Scho- 
mann, 11.^ 
271. 



INFLUENCE OF WOMEN. 49 

time; but we cannot but believe that the 
philosopher is generalising hastily from a 
few notorious instances ; and, in one point 
of his criticism, his censures of the 
cowardice which he thinks they showed 
during the invasion of Laconia by Epa- Pintarch (i. 
minondas, he is clearly unfair to them, is indignant 
On the whole, it appears that the splendid representa- 
vigour and beauty, which was universally ^"s^totle. 
ascribed to the Spartan women,* was not 
purchased at the cost of maidenly purity 
and decorum. But the interest in manly 
accomplishments which their whole train- 
ing gave to them, must have added 
great weight to their influence with the 
youths ; and the hope of distinguishing 
himself under their eyes in gymnastic 
contests, must have been one of the most 
powerful incentives to a youthful Spar- 
tan. It was the crowning point of the 
Lacedaemonian training that, at solemn 
feasts, the maidens stood around, "now 
and then making by jests a befitting 
reflection upon those who had misbehaved 
themselves in the wars, and again sing- 

* To this we have frequent reference in the Lysistrata. 

£ 



\k 



so EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

ing encomiums upon those who had done 
any gallant action; and by these means 
inspiring the younger sort with an emu- 
lation of their glory. Those who were 
thus commended went away proud, elated, 
and gratified with their honour among the 
maidens ; and those who wore rallied were 
as sensibly touched with it as if they had 
been formally reprimanded ; and so much 
the more, because the kings and the 
Plutarch, i. elders, as well as the rest of the city, 

1 02 (Clough). 

saw and heard all that passed/' 

Such is a general sketch of the theory 
Athenian and practice of national education at 

opinions of 

this system. Sparta. Its errors and defects have been 
occasionally noted in passing ; but these 
brief notices may now be supplemented by 
a somewhat more complete consideration 
of the question, What was the judgment 
of contemporaneous Hellas on the system ? 
Cp. Mem. iii. Some there were, like Xenophon, who 
But this strong viewed it with an unmodified admiration. 

Spartan tone -^r ^ . , . . , n t 

disappears in Nowhere m his treatise do we find a 
Avork, De trace of criticism. He strikes the key- 
Cp! Grote?" ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^t few lines : " Lycurgus, 
Plato, iii. 601. ^j^Q gave them the laws whereby they || 



THE SPARTAN SYSTEM CRITICIZED. 51 

grew to prosperity, I greatly admire, and 
hold to have been extremely wise" (etc rh 

€<rxara /xaXa ffo</!)oi' ^yoiz/iac), and from this he 

never deviates. Nor does he ever give 
a hint that the success of this belauded 
legislation had been less than might have 
been expected ; for the chapter ** de de- 
pravata Lycurgi disciplina" bears the 
plainest marks of spuriousness. But the 
ordinary judgment was not so favourable. 
The way in which the Spartan system 
was looked upon by a cultivated Athenian 
may be gathered from the magnificent 
speech of Pericles, in Thucydides (11. 
35-47)' Whether the words employed are 
those of the orator or those of the his- 
torian matters but little for our present Cp. Thuc. i. 
purpose. Thucydides is at least as good ' ' 
an authority as Pericles for the general 
tone of feeling at Athens. "We find in the 
Funeral Speech, throughout the earlier 
chapters, an under-current of allusion to 
Spartan practices, with which the Athe- 
nian customs are contrasted. The original 
and autochthonous nature of the Athenian 
constitution, the absence of any disabili- 



52 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

ties arising from birth or fortune, the 
spirit of liberty which regulated every 
act of public or private life, the ready 
toleration of varying habits and pursuits, 
the freedom from sour and censorious 
looks, the willing obedience from a sense 
of honour to the national code, written 
or understood, all are points in which 
Athens is praised, and Sparta implicitly 
disparaged. The orator dwells on their 
full enjoyment of the festivities, which the 
Dorians ridiculed, and of the luxuries of 
every clime, attracted to their capital by 
its splendour and its fortunate position. 
Strangers are gladly welcomed, and alien 
acts unknown. Their fondness for art is 
free from extravagance, their love of letters 
does not disable them for war or business. 
Above all, they do not, as their rivals do, 
set out in pursuit of manly prowess by 
a long and toilsome process of training; 
yet, though living at their ease, they are 
as ready to meet dangers as any one, 
happily combining chivalrous daring with 
a careful calculation of the expedient 
course. And thus a double advantage is 



I 



PLA raS JUDGMENT OF IT. 5 3 

gained ; they do not suffer from the dread of 
impending dangers, nor do they yield in 
courage to the slaves of a life-long drill. 
Whatever the pedant might say, the 
practical statesman had little doubt that 
the boasted system of Lycurgus sacrificed 
the noblest parts of the nature of man 
to secure in lower regions a superiority 
that was at best but doubtful. Though 
here the orator does less than justice to 
Lacedaemon. Whether the cost was not 
too great at which her pre-eminence in 
arms was purchased, is another question ; 
but it cannot be doubted that it was re- 
cognised and admitted as a rule in Greece ; 
and few were ashamed to confess them- 
selves inferior in military skill and dis- 
cipline to the consummate craftsmen and 

professors of military science (a/cpot nxynai cp. Grote, ii. 

214, 215. 

*.ai ao<pL(TTa\ tUv iroXejutKitiy). 

Plato seems to have been strongly p/ato's admi- 
attracted by the ordinances of Lycurgus. 
They furnished him a concrete instance 
on which to base his ideal structure. At 
Sparta that absolute supremacy of the 
State in every detail of the life of the 



54 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

citizen, which he laid down as his funda- 
mental postulate, was actually carried into 
Plato, iii. 210. effect. As Mr. Grote says, to an objector 
who had asked him how he could pos- | 
sibly expect that individuals would submit 
to such an unlimited interference as that 
which he enjoined in his Republic, he 
would have replied : " Look at Sparta. You 
see there interference as constant and 
rigorous as that which I propose, endured 
by the citizens, not only without resist- 
ance, but with a tenacity and long con- 
tinuance such as is not found among 
other communities with more lax regu- 
lations. The habits and sentiments of the 
Spartan citizen are fashioned to these 
institutions. Far from being anxious to 
shake them off, he accounts them a ne- 
cessity as well as an honour." But though 
he had much sympathy with the Spartan 
institutions, and based his own schemes, 
as stated in the Republic and the 
Laws, more upon them than upon any 
other existing system, still he was not 
wholly blind to its defects.* His criti- 
♦ Mr. Jowett defines the Republic as " the Spartan c<mh 



I 



I 



PLATO'S CRITICISMS. 55 

cisms are to be found mainly in the first Plato's 
book of the Laws, where the Athenian 
examines the constitutions of Crete and P. 633. 
Sparta. The principal points of his cen- 
sure are the preference of war to peace, 
and the direction thus given to the 
whole course of education, the neglect of 
music in favour of gymnastic exercises, 
the license which existed among the 
Spartan women, and the yet greater p. 637 B 
evils which arose from the close in- 
timacy of the gymnasia and the common 
feasts. He pronounces that Lacedaemon p. 636. 
had no institutions to strengthen her 
citizens against the temptations of plea- 
sure, and that the value of festive inter- 
course, as a revealer of the character 
of men, was wholly lost sight of. In 
the second book he finds fault with the 
exclusive attention paid to choral music : 
"Your young men,** he says to Megillus, 
the Spartan, " are like wild colts, feeding 
in a herd together; no one takes the 
individual colt and rubs him down, and 

stitution appended to a government of philosophers " (Plato, 
iv. 20), and there is as much truth in this as there usually is 
in an epigram. 



56 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

tries to give him the qualities which would 
make him a statesman as well as a 
soldier/' They ought to have been taught 
that courage was not the first of the 
virtues, as Tyrtaeus had ranked it, but 
only the fourth, and lowest among the 
cardinal virtues. On the other hand, 
Plato heartily commends in the Spartan 
system of national education the impor- 
tance attached to obedience, and the slight 
regard for wealth, the care taken of mar- 
riages, and the reverence paid to elders. 

What his own views were on the train- 
ing of the youth of a nation, we shall have 
to consider more fully hereafter. 
Aristotle's Aristotle in his criticism of the Spar- 

cnttcisms. 

tan constitution (Polit. II. 9) touches but 
slightly on the method of education ; but 
he fully accepts the judgment of Plato, 
as expressed in his Laws, that fault may 
be justly found with the fundamental 
principle (yiroQiaio) of the legislator, inas- 
much as the whole system of his laws is 
directed towards the cultivation of a part 
Pol. r, 0, 34. only of virtue, that which secures supre- 
macy in war. Hence, as he says, " they 



ARISTOTLE'S CRITICISMS. 57 

were preserved in a healthy condition 
while they were at war, but they fell into 
ruin when they had won the supremacy 

{kaut^ovTO fxey TroXefjiovvreg, d7r(i)\\vvTo hi dp^avreg). 

In another passage he censures their extreme 
devotion to gymnastics, which left their 
children untaught in all the points essen- 
tial to man, the most necessary rudiments 
of intellectual training ; thus, Amv ds raira 

av€VT€<: Tov<i TTtttSas, Koi Tcuv oLvayKatuiv aTraiSayto- 

yy'/Tov^ Troirycrurrei /Javavcrous Karepya^oi'Tat Kara Pol. v, (viii.) 

4, 5, 

y€ TO aXqOk. But it is noteworthy that the 
other main point in which the Spartan 
national education seems so defective to 
the judgment of modern Christian Europe, 
namely, that so large a portion of the nation 
was excluded from its benefits, is specially 
chosen out by Aristotle for approval. For, 
he says, freedom from the necessity of 
attention to the first requisites of life on 
the part of the citizens, is one of the 
most important notes of a well organized 
community. A subject population, living in Pol. ii. 9, 2. 
ignorant slavery or serfage, is regarded by 
him with a complacency which is strangely 
foreign to our own ideas of justice. 



58 EDUCATION IN SPARTA. 

Only, he adds, it is difficult to know how 
to deal with such ; for if you treat them 
kindly they wax wanton, but if they are 
treated with severity you must always 
be on your guard against conspiracy and 
revolt. The account which Aristotle gives 
us of the cowardly, domineering, and ava- 
ricious spirit engendered in the Spartan 
women, by what he considers their lax 
and disorderly training, has been already 
touched upon. 

On the general question of Spartan 
education there is little to be added from 
our modern stand-point to the criticisms 
of the philosophers of Athens. The evils 
arising from a discipline so narrow in its 
aims and so unnatural in its processes, 
cannot be felt or described more forcibly 
than was the case with Plato and Aris- 
Fuf-ther totlc. But we may be permitted to 

defects. 

notice one point on which they do not 
dwell. It was death to a Spartan to 
leave his country without permission ; and 
this is a significant fact. The Spartan 
discipline v/as possible only so long as 
all the citizens subjected to it were kept 



ITS DEFECTS. 59 

in narrow isolation from the rest of Hellas. 
The ievrjXaa-La of Lacedaemon, which seemed 
so repulsive to the rest of the Greeks, was 
simply a needful measure of self-preserva- 
tion. In the presence of those who lived 
by other and laxer rules, a Spartan felt 
bewildered; the only law he knew was 
the law of his country, and if strangers 
had been permitted to settle in Laconia 
the same result must have followed there 
which we find in almost every case in 
which a Spartan was absent for any long 
time from his fatherland. The ties of the 
law in which he had been educated were 
broken, and no others were found to take 
their place; so that he fell into a law- 
lessness which was rarely if ever rivalled 
by the citizens of less rigidly organized Cp. Curtius, i. 

204, and again 

communities. Not only were the aims of i. 211. 
the Spartan education low and unworthy, 
but also they required for their attainment 
external conditions which were w^holly in- 
consistent with the free and full develope- 
ment of the life of the nation and of the 
individual citizens. 



CHAPTER II. 



NATIONAL EDUCATION AT ATHENS. 



Athens com- 
pared with 
Sparta. 




[E pass into a wholly different air 
when we turn from the banks 
of the Eurotas to the slopes 
of Hymettus. The sun is as 
bright and the breeze as healthy; but 
there is a dainty clearness in the sky* 
that was wanting in the shadow of Tay- 
getus, and the many-dimpling sparkle of 
the ocean seems to lend a brightness to 
the heaven under which it is smiling. As 
the lofty mountain-wall which hems in 
Laconia on every side but that which is 
guarded by a cliff-bound coast seemed 
destined to preserve the Spartans in a 



• The infinite charm of the Athenian air has been nowhere 
more gracefully set forth than by Dr. Newman, ** Historica] 
Sketches," pp. 20-22. 



ATHENS AND SPARTA, 6i 

rigid isolation, so the " highway of the Cp. Pictet, 
nations," to which the peninsular form Pnmitifs, i. 
and excellent harbours of Attica gave such Curtius, 
easy access, appeared to attract its autoch- ^x^^, 
thonous people to a richly-cultured and 
manifold life. As in the garrison-city of 
Sparta the State held absolute lordship 
over every citizen, from the cradle to the 
grave, so — 

Where on the ^gean shore the city stood, 
Built nobly, 

the true Hellenic principle of the fullest 
and freest developement of the individual, 
ruled every civic ordinance. It is evident A"^ State 

. , P - . . education at 

that a national system of education, in Athens. 
the strictest sense of the term, would have 
been wholly foreign to the genius of the 
State. To force every citizen from child- 
hood into the same rigid mould, to crush 
the play of the natural emotions and 
impulses, and to sacrifice the beauty and 
joy of the life of the agora, or the country 
home, to the claims of military drill, were 
aims which were happily rendered need- 
less by the position of Attica, as well as 
distasteful to the Athenian temperament. 



62 EDUCATION AT ATHENS. \ 

And yet, on the other hand, we are not 
to suppose that — at least in the better 
days of the State — the liberty which was 
readily conceded was allowed to pass into 
unrestricted license. If the methods by 
which a father should train his children 
were not rigidly prescribed by the State, 
at least the object to be attained was set 
before him, and not only the force of 
public opinion, but also the positive con- 
trol of law and judicial authority, was 
brought to bear on him to secure its ac- I 
complishment. If there was no common 
discipline, at least there were definite 
laws requiring that every child should be f I 
Plato, Crito, trained in the two great branches of Greek 

50 E. ^ ^ 

education, /w-ovo-ikt} and yvfivaa-rLic^, And so 
long as it retained its original powers, 
the court of Areopagus was charged with 
the enforcement of the laws in this respect, 
isocrates com- Quintilian (v. 9, 13) tells us that they even 

plains bitterly "^ 

of the disuse Condemned to death a boy who had torn 

of this super- 1 , r • 

vision on the out the eyes of his quails ; and according 

part of the 4. a *t, /• 

Areopagus, ^o Atnenaeus (iv. 6} two youths were 
brought up before them, charged with 
attending the lectures of philosophers 



II 



AMUSEMENTS OF CHILDREN. 63 

without having any visible livelihood. In- 
stances like this, which might be mul- 
tiplied, show that the supervision exercised 
was not merely nominal. 

At first children were left wholly to the Amusements 

. . of children. 

care of their mothers and nurses, and the 
diligence of scholars like Becker and 
Hermann has gathered many interesting 
particulars of their modes of training. Toys Cp. Hermann, 

. J 1 / Piivatalterth. 

of many kinds are mentioned — rattles (see pp. 261-268. 

p. 18), toy carts,* and beds, dolls of wax 

and clay, hoops, and tops ; several games 

are noticed, such as flying cockchafers 

and blind-man's buff ; f and stories of Cp. Ar. Nub. 

763 (Kock), 

various kinds, terrific or amusing, were and Schoi. on 
employed to frighten the children out of 
mischief,t or to keep them in good humour. 
As soon as the children grew too old to 

* Ar. Nub. 863 ; cp. 877-881. 

t Cp. Pollux, ix. 122. i] ck xaXK»7f«fta>''«tvi'9ra)6^0aX/zo> 
'ntpi(S<piylavTtQ hog iraicog, 6 ftkv Trtpiarpi^trai KTjpvrTioV 
XaXKrjv fivlav Oi]pcnsu>' oi St diroKpivafttvoi, Orjpaasig aXX' ov 
Xi]rpei, OKVTtai j8v/3\ivotf naiovaiv avruv, eoi; tivoq avTwv 
\i,\PiTai. (For darpuKivda cp. Fhaedr. 241 B with Dr. 
Thompson's note). 

i Chrysippus blames those who would deter men from sin 
by the fear of punishment from the gods— u»C ovSkv SiOipspov 
rag rfig 'AKKOvg Kai Trjg 'AXcpnodg, ot <uv rd natddpia row 
KaKoaxoXi'iv a\ yvva'iKtg dmipyovciv. 



64 ED UCA TION AT A TUENS. 

The slave- be managed any longer by their mothers 
and nurses, they were placed under the 
care of TratSaywyoi.* The primary duty oi 
these slave-attendants was to conduct the 
children to the public schools, but they 
had also entrusted to them a general 
supervision of their conduct, and espe- 
cially of their manners and deportment 
(ivjcotr/uta) ; and they appear even to have 
inflicted personal chastisement. f They 
would be naturally chosen from the most 
honest and trusted members of the house- 
hold, but as a rule they possessed little or 
no literary accomplishments themselves. 
^ Plutarch is very indignant at the careless- 

* Cp. an amusing passage in Lucian Hermotim. 82 : sttii 
Koi ai TirOni TOiadi Xkyovffi rrtpi rutv rrai^iuiVf ojg aTTtrkov 
avTolq Iq SidaffKciXoV jcai yup av ixtjdiiru) fiaBtXv dyaOov Ti 
ivvuivrai, aXK' ovv <pao\ov ovSkv iroiritTovffLV skiI fitvovrsg. 
Cp. Ussing, Darstellung, &c. pp. 68-73, ^^^ Lightfoot on 
Gal. iii. 24. 

+ The TratSayojye'iov mentioned by Demosthenes (de Cor. 
p. 313) was probably a wai.ing-room, devoted to the use of 
the slave-attendants [so Hermann in Charikles, ii. p. 21 and 
Simcox, ad loc] ; Mr. Holmes (with Pollux, iv. 19) takes 
it to mean simply the schoolroom, but this meaning weakens 
the force of the passage ; and is there any authority for bis 
assertion that Trai^aywyig sometimes is used in the wider 
sense of '• tutor ? " All the instances of this usage that I 
have been able to discover, belong to a later time than that 
of Demosthenes. (Cp. Hermann, Privatalterth. p. 276, 19). 



1! 



THE PEDAGOGUES, 65 

ness which some parents in his day showed 
in the choice of their "pedagogues/' en- 
trusting the care of their children only to 
such slaves as were unfit for any other 
occupation.* The age at which the chil- 
dren were committed to the pedagogues 
cannot have been fixed very rigidly ; 
much would depend upon their own char- 
acter and developement, and much upon 
the position of their parents ; for, as Plato 
says (Protagor. p. 326), the sons of rich 
men would go to school earlier than 
those of others, and remain there longer. 
But from several passages of Plato and 
Aristotle it seems probable that the usual 
age for commencing to attend school was 
about seven years, and that for two or 
three years after that the children learnt 
little or nothing but gymnastics. There 
is no reason to believe that the schools 
received any subvention from the State ; f 

* Morals, i. p. 9 (Goodwin). Cp. Plato, Ale. i. p. 122 B. 
ffoc ^«, Si *AXic. IlfpiicXf/g iiriarritr TraiSayioyov ruiv oUtruiv 
TOP dxpaoTarov vtto yriptjjQ ; and Lysis, ad fin., where the 
pedagogues appear as very boorish. Ussing notices that 
where they are represented on monuments they have barbaric 
features and diess (p. 67). Cp. Stark's Niobe u. Niobiden, 
PI. ii. iv. vii. x\'i. xix. 

t Cp. [Plato] Alcib. i. p. 122 B. ttiq Sk aqc yivhtuti;, w 

F 



66 EDUCATION AT ATHENS, 

Cp. Laws. p. they appear to have been without exception 

794 and Ar. 

Pol. iv. (vii.), " pnvate venture *' schools, and, as might 
here Hermann have been expected, of very various degrees 

in Charikles, r • -t-n i i 

ii. 23, rather 01 merit. Demosthenes, when taunting 

mann, Gr.* Aeschines with the lowness of his origin, 

^'^' speaks of the school kept by the father 

of the latter in terms of great contempt: 

irpo? TO) Tov "Hpo) Tov tarpov, oirws eSwaro, dAX* ow €V 

TttuTTy yc lt,y). But in the speech de Corona he 
claims for himself that when he was a boy he 
went to suitable schools. What the custom- 
ary fees were we have no means of knowing ; f | 
for the charges of rhetoricians and sophists 
— which are frequently mentioned — give us 
no clue to the practice in ordinary day- 
schools.* But though they were not sup- 
ported by the State, they were subject to 
a rigorous official supervision, at least, so 
far as the character of the teachers and the 
regulations of the school were concerned. 

'AXrtj3ca5i;, KaX Tpo<prjg, Kai rratSdag, ^ dWov otovovv 'A9ii- 

VaibJVf b}Q CTTOC (ITTCIV, OvStvi fliXtl. 

• Dem. F. L. p. 419 (p. 158 ed. Shilleto). Cp. de Cor. 
p. 313, where we have some curious details on the " interior " 
of a school at Athens. From Ar. Nub. 965, it is evident 
that they were spread over the various districts (/cw/iai) of 
the city. 



ATHENIAN SCHOOLS. 67 

Aeschines (in Timarch. §§ 9, 10) says : "The 
lawgiver shows a certain distrust of the 
teachers, to whom of necessity we commit 
our children, though their livelihood de- 
pends upon their character for morality, 
and the loss of this would reduce them to 
beggary ; for he explicitly ordains in the 
fir^t place the hour at which a free-bom 
boy is to come to the school, and secondly 
the number of boys with whom he is to be 
taught, and when he is to leave ; and he 
forbids teachers to open their schools, or 
trainers their wrestling-grounds, before 
sunrise, and orders them to close them 
before sunset, feeling the greatest distrust 
of solitude and darkness ; and he ordains 
who are to be the boys who frequent these 
schools, and what is to be their age, and 
what magistrate is to superintend them/' * 
But we have no means of knowing to what 
magistrate this duty was allotted. We find 
at Athens no iratSoi/o/xot, such as existed in 

* Some additional details are added by the laws quoted 
in § 12, but their genuineness, as is the case with most of 
those quoted by the orators, is open to the gravest suspicion. 
Cp. Franke's edition and K. F. Hermann in Charikles, ii. 
p. 21. 



68 EDUCA TION AT A THENS, 

Sparta and elsewhere ; and though in lat6r 

times we have mention of a-axfipoviarai, KoafiriraC 

and {nroKoa-fjLTjraCf who exercised a control 
over the gymnasia, these seem to belong 
entirely to the period when Athens had 
become the University of the Roman 
Empire, and its schools were thronged 
by students from every province.* To such 
Mfns of schools, then, did the Athenian boys resort 

education. ...... 

from an early age to be taught the limited 
curriculum which was then regarded as 
furnishing the needful training for a citizen. 
It is noteworthy that we find in Athens 



* Cp. Schoraaiin Griech. Alterth. i. p. 525. Of the Irrtftt- 
\ijTat Tutv l0^j3a/v mentioned by Dinarchus (Hermann Pol. 
Ant. § 150, 4), we know next to nothing; the allusion in 
Dem. Fals. Leg. p. 433, is very vague, and need not refer to 
any special magistracy (cp. however Bockh, Public Economy, 
book ii. c. xvi.) ; and the genuineness of Plato's Axiochus is 
much too doubtful to allow us to argue anything from the 
expressions in p. 367 A. On the University character of 
Athens at a later time cp. Dr. Newman's Historical Sketches, 
cc. iii. iv. vi. vii., and especially Neubauer's Comnientationes 
Epigraphicae^ with the review by Mr. E. L. Hicks in Aca- 
demy, I. 141. But that it was already beginning to assume 
this character is shown, not merely by plirases like koivov 
rraiStvrripiov ■nacriv dvGptijTrotQ (Diod. xiii. 27) and " Sal- 
vete Athenae, quae nutrices Graeciae" (Plaut. Stich. 649 — 
probably presei-ved from the original by Menander), but also 
from [^schin.] Epist. xii. 699. kuI 'inpoi fxev, u)g loiKt, ro^i* 
havTutv rraidagf Toifg ri Iv Bonnrig. yivvijOevraQ rj iv AiVcuXi^, 
irpof vfidg Trifnrovari r^c avroQi rraiSiiag fxtOi^ovrai;, 



THE AIMS OF EDUCATION. 09 

a clear comprehension of the essential 
character of liberal education. The deluded 
endeavour after "practical utility," which 
proves so misleading to much of the popular 
education of our own day, was then un- 
known, or known only to be branded as 
unworthy and contemptible. No special 
training was given for special needs in 
after life ; the Athenians judged aright that 
the acquirements needed for particular 
trades or professions might safely be left 
to be gained at a later stage by those who 
intended to make use of them.* But the 
teaching which the nation encouraged, if 
it did not prescribe it, aimed at some- 
thing better than the production of " com- 
mercial men;" it endeavoured to give the 
free and general culture becoming to a 



citizen of the " school of Hellas." As 
Aristotle says, "to be always in quest of 
what is useful is by no means becoming to 
high-minded gentlemen " (rots /tcyoXoj/^vxois koX 

* Cp. Curtius, ii. 417, and Hermann in Charikles, ii. 32, 
'•derUnterricht . . . gerade eine Erhebung iiber dieBanausie 
des alltiiglichen Bedarfes bezweckte." Cp, also Wittmann» 
Erziehung und Unterricht bei Platon, p. 9. Hippocrates 
in the Protagoras says that he learnt music and gymnastics 
— -owic itrX Texvy aXA' iiri iratStia. 



70 ED UCA TION AT A THENS. 

Pol. V. (viii.) Tois i\€vOepoL<i). Its subjects were limited in 
range, but they gained in depth and 
thoroughness more than they lost in ex- 
tent. " The mental culture was but plain 
and simple, yet it took hold of the entire 
man : and this all the more deeply and 
energetically, inasmuch as the youthful 
mind was not distracted by a multiplicitous 
variety, and could, therefore, devote a pro- 
portionately closer devotion to the mental 
food, and to the materials of culture offered 
to it/* fCurtius ii. 416.)* 

Reading and In " music " the first Stage, of course, 

writing. 1 r • • -i 

was the study of ypa/x//ara, which included 

* In the following sketch of the subjects of education, it 
must be remembered that they were strictly confined to boys. 
The education given to Athenian girls is adequately summed 
up in the words of Ischomachus in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, 
c. vii. 5. Socrates asks him whether he had himself trained 
(iTTat^cvorai,) his wife to be as she ought to be, or whether 
when he received her from her father and mother she knew 
how to discharge all her duties. A nd Ischomachus replies : 
Kot ri av 6-7ri<Trafiiv7]v avri^y frapiXa/3ov, i} trri fiiv nvtrio 
TTiVTSxatdeKa ysyovvia ijXOf. irpbg i/i€, tov S* ifirrpotrBiv 
Xpovov IJjy viro ttoW^c kirtfieXsiag OTru}i; i\axi<TTa fikv oypoiTO, 
iXax^TTa S' olkov'^oito, i\dxi<Tra 5' ipoiTo ; " "Why what 
could she have known, when I married her .'' She was not 
fifteen years of age when she came to me, and during the 
whole of the time before her marriage great pains had been 
taken with her that she might see as little as possible, bear as 
little as possible, and ask as little as possible." Then follows 
a very pretty sketch of the way in which he taught her various 
duties. 



READING, 71 

reading and writing. Whether arithmetic 

was added in the Athenian schools, as 

Plato (Laws, vii. 819) wished it to be in 

his ideal State, •seems to Hermann more 

than doubtful,^on the ground that a matter Cp. Charikles, 

of merely practical value was never reckoned 

as TTcuSeta ; but it is hardly likely that such an 

essential branch of knowledge should have 

been wholly passed over.* We find that the 

knowledge of the use of the abacus or calcu- Cp. Jebb's 

t • -I 1 . 1 .-I -..r -TTT. ■• Theophraslus, 

lating-board was common in daily life. With pp. 189, 217. 
regard to reading, Becker appears to think 
that when the names and powers of the 
letters had been mastered, the pupils next 
began to read by the syllabic method ;t but 



* Mathematics certainly were not wholly neglected, as we 
may see from the beginning of the Erastae (the genuineness 
of which Mr. Grote satisfactorily defends, i. 452), where, in 
tlie house of Dionysius the schoolmaster, two youths are 
represented as debating some geometrical problem. Plato 
gives us an idea of how he would have it taught in the well- 
known passage of the Meno (84 D, 85 B) ; and the impor- 
tance which he attached to the study comes out in many of 
his works (cp. esp. Rep. vii. 522 E, 525 D, 528 B, Legg. v. 
747 B. He uses mathematical examples inter alios locos in 
Euthyph. 12 D, Theaet. 147 D). But how far the study of 
mathematics was pursued at schools, and how far it was left 
to later life, we have no means of determining. 

t If I understand aright Becker's " Syllabirmethode," 
as opposed to the "reine Buchstabirmethode," he denotes 
by the former the admuable method of learning to read 



72 EDUCATION AT ATHENS. 

the passage quoted by him from Dionysius 

of Halicarnassus hardly bears out the 

Cp. Ussing, inter{)retation which he puts upon it ; and 

op. cit. p. IC7, . , 

note. It IS expressly contradicted by another 

Athen. x. 79, passage quoted from Athenaeus, which 
p. 453. 

tells us how there was a kind of metrical 

chant used in schools, running ^^ aA.<^a ySa, 

^rfva. €t )9e, yS^a 5 /?>?» fir^ra iwra ySi, /Srjra ov fio, 
jirJTa u> )8<o* Kal naXiv iv dvriOTpoifiw tov fiiXov^ koi 
rov /X€Tpov, ydfJL/xa aX<^a, ydfifia ct k.t.A,. kol inl twv 
\.ouru)v crvWa^wv o/xotitos €Ka<rTwv.* Meriting was 

PVriting. taught by copies, the masters drawing 
lines on which the pupil was to write the 
letters set before him, as Plato tells us 

(Protag. 326 D) 01 ypafXfiarurTal rots /iiyirco Seivois 
ypdfj>€LV TWV TraiSwi/ v7roypdtf/avT€': ypa/x/xas tq ypa<f}CSL 

(recently brought into more general notice by Messrs. 
Meiklejohn and Sonnenscliein), in which the pupil is not 
taught the names of the letters at first, but simply their 
powers, so that he is able to combine them into syllables at 
once, without the confusion of ideas that often arises from 
the common system. But this is one of the somewhat 
numerous passages in which the English abridgement 
of *< Charicles " purchases brevity at the cost of the sacri- 
fice of the most important phrases and clauses of the 
original. 

* In Dionys. Halic. (de admir. vi die. in Demosth. c. 52) 
we have the following account of the various stages in 
learning to read : ♦* First, we learn the names of the letters 
{aToi\iia TrJQ ^utvrjs) that is the ypdfifiaray then their several 
forms and values (rt/Trovf Kai Svvafitle), then syllables and 



STUDY OF THE POETS. 73 

ovrti) TO ypa/JLfiaTCLOv StSoaci koI dvayKa^ovcri ypd<fi€iv 
Kara ttjv vf^rjyrjcriv twv ypa/xfxojv '. here ypafi/xai 

must mean the lines drawn for the guidance 
of the pupil, and not, as some would under- 
stand it, letters which the pupil was to 
trace over ; though the latter practice was Cp. Sauppe 
also adopted, as we see from a passage in 
Quintilian (I. i. 27, Halm): " Cum vero iam 
ductus sequi coeperit (puer), non inutile erit 
literas tabellae quam optime insculpi, ut 
per illos velut sulcos ducatur stilus" (cp. 
also V. 14, 31). But in the judgment of Plato 
(Laws, vii. 810) too much attention ought 
not to be given to handwriting : if boys 
cannot readily acquire quickness and beauty 
of writing in the time allowed to their 
studies, they must be content to let it 
alone. 

As soon as the needful rudiments oi study of the 
reading and writing were mastered, the 

their modifications (rd inpi ravra TraOr)), and finally nouns 
and verbs and connecting particles, and the changes which 
they undergo {6v6p.aTa kuI prjftaTa xai avvSsafiovQ Kai ra 
ffVfifiel3r]K6ra tovtoic. avfrroXag, tKrdcreig, 6KvTr}TaQ, (iapv- 
TtiTag, irTiitfffiQj apiOpoi'c, iyKXicfigy to, dWa TrapairXrjoia 
TovToiq). Then we begin to read and to write, at first 
syllable by syllable, very slowly, and then more rapidly, as 
we acquire some familiarity." 



74 EDUCA TION AT A THENS. 

teachers commenced the more important 
part of literary education. ** Placing the 

Protag. 325 E. pupils," as Plato says, ** on the benches, 
they make them read and learn by heart the 
poems of good poets, in which are many 
moral lessons, many tales and eulogies 
and lays of the brave men of old, that 
the boys may imitate them with emula- 
tion, and strive to become such them-|i 
selves." It appears that in very early 
times there were selections from the works 
of Homer, Hesiod, Iheognis, Phokylides, 
and many of the lyric poets, expressly 
intended for use in schools. Some, like 

SchomannGr. Nikeratos in Xenophon's Symposium, 

Ak. 1. 519. ^ J r y 

From Ar. Av. Went SO far as to learn by heart the 

471, it is clear 

that^sop whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and 

was used as ^ ^ 

an elementary he boasts that he could Still repeat them 

book : cnjiadi)(^ r * n 

yap t>yf . . . i^om memory. At first, we may believe 

Tre7rdrr)Kag. ^^^^ ^hesc poems Were simply explamed 

to the boys, the meaning of words and 

phrases discussed, and obscure allusions 

interpreted.* But before long ypdfifxaTa 

* We have an example of the kind of catechising that 
was practised in the fragments of the AairaXeHg of Aristo- 
phanes^ quoted by Galen in the preface to the Lexicon 
Hippocraticuni ; e.g: — 



MUSIC, 75 

was supplemented by the other great sec- Musk, 
tion of ixova-LK-^; and the boys were taught 
to chant the poems they had learnt to a 
suitable accompaniment on the lyre. Ac- 
cording to Plato Ki6dpi<ri^ was not to com- Laws, vii. p. 

810 A. 

mence till the boys were thn-teen years 
of age, when they had already spent 
three years on the study of letters ; but 
we have no means, I believe, of deter- 
mining whether in laying down this regu- 
lation for his ideal State, he was following 
or correcting the practice common at 
Athens. It is evident, of course, that a 
certain time would have to be spent in 
acquiring a command over the instrument * 

trpoff ravra ait \iXov 'OfirjpeiovQ yXurrag, ri koXoviti. Kopvfifia, 

and again — 

o fiiv ovv coQ, kfibg d' ovtoq adeXtpbg (ppaffdru ri KoXovaiv 

idviovg. 
Cp. Aristophanis Fragmenta, ed. Dindorf. (1869) p. 182. 
The ^aiToKtiQ would have probably furnished us \vith many 
more hints on Athenian education, had it been preserved to 
us ; for the subject appears to have been furnished by two 
brothers, one addicted to the old-fashioned methods of 
learning, another to new-fangled ways, regarded of course 
with no little disfavour by Aristophanes. 

* Hermann notices that the Xvpa is more frequently Charikles, ii. 
mentioned by the earlier writers (with the exception of 38. 
Homer, where the word does not occur) than the KiOapa ; 
but the latter was a much lighter instrument (Diet. Ant. s.v. 
Lyra), and was therefore probably used in schools. The use 
of the flute, so common in Boeotia, was at one time prac- 



76 



EDUCATION AT ATHENS, 



before it could be employed to accompany 

the voice in recitations or chantings. We 

injlueticeof have already noticed (p. 35) the importance 

attached to the study of music. Plutarch 

Vol. I. pp. in his treatise on the subject is only 

132-3 . 

(Goodwin), expressing the common Greek sentiment 

when he writes: "Whoever he be that 

shall give his mind to the study of 

music in his youth, if he meet with a 

musical education proper for the forming 

and regulating his inclinations, he will be 

sure to applaud and embrace that which 

is noble and generous, and to rebuke and 

blame the contrary, as well in other things 

as in what belongs to music. And by 

that means he will become clear from all 

reproachful actions, for now having reaped 

the noblest fruit of music, he may be of 

great use, not only to himself, but to the 

commonwealth; while music teaches him 

to abstain from everything that is indecent, 

both in word and deed, and to observe 



tised at A.thens, but it was afterwards discouraged, partly 
because its music was supposed to be too passionate and 
orgiastic in its character, and partly because it could not be 
accompanied by the voice of the performer. Cp. Arist. PoU 
V. (viii.) 6, 6, and Cic. pro Mar. 13, 29. 



I 



INFLUENCE OF MUSIC. 77 

decorum, temperance, and regularity" 
(§41). And again yet more emphatically, 
(§ 31): " The right moulding or ruin of in- 
genuous manners and civil conduct lies 
in a well-grounded musical education." 
Plato constantly expresses similar opinions, 
as, for instance, in the Timaeus (p. 47 d), 
where he says that " harmony is not re- 
garded by him who intelligently uses the 
Muses as given by them with a view to 
irrational pleasure, but with a view to 
the inharmonical course of the soul and 
as an ally for the purpose of reducing 
this into harmony and agreement with 
itself; and rhythm was given by them 
for the same purpose, on account of the 
irregular and graceless ways which pre- 
vail among mankind generally, and to 
help us against them." And again in 
the Protagoras (p. 326 B.) : "They make 
rhythm and harmony familiar to the souls 
of boys, that they may grow more gentle, 
and graceful, and harmonious, and so be Cp. too Rep. 
of service both in words and deeds; for vii. 812; and' 
the whole life of man stands in need of(vin.)*5, 
grace and harmony." Hence we find ^^~^^' 



78 EDUCA TION AT A THENS, 

that the greatest care was taken to adapt 
the tunes to the poems to which they 
were to be sung, and to provide that both 
the one and the other should be pure, 
noble, and elevating. It is quite as mu( n 
on ethical as on eesthetic grounds that 
Aristophanes attacks so fiercely the cor- 
rupters of the music of his own day. 
Philoxenus, Kinesias, and Phrynis all 
come in for his censures, as contributing, 
by their effeminate and enervating music, 
Cp. Nub. 971. to the degeneracy of the Athenian youth. 
And in the controversy between Aeschylus 
and Euripides in the Ranae, as to their 
respective merits, hardly less importance 
is attached to the formal {i,e, the rhyth- 
mical and musical) side of their works 
than to the material or moral and re- 
Plato, iii. 336. ligious side. Mr. Grote has pointed out 
how even a practical politician like Poly- 
bins considers a training in music indis- 
pensable for the softening of violent and 
polyb. iv. pp. sanguinary tempers. The Athenian critics 

20, 21, of the r J 1 ... r -I • 

rude Area- lound the mam object of their attacks 
Kynaetha. i^ the later developements of the Dithy- 
ramb, which had always been allowed 



HIGHER EDUCATION, 79 

great laxity of construction, but which, 
towards the close of the fifth century 
before Christ, in the hands of Melanip* 
pides, Philoxenus, Kinesias, Phrynis, Timo- 
theus, and Polyeidus went through a 
gp*adual process of degradation. The prin- 
cipal ground of censure with the philoso- 
phers and moralists was that which Plato 
(Gorg. 501 d) expressly adduces in the 
case of Kinesias, that the musicians had 
come to attach no importance to making 
their hearers better, and only sought to 
please the greater number. Hence, as we 
shall shortly see, Plato and Aristotle, in 
their ideal schemes of national education, 
insist repeatedly on the necessity of a 
rigid ofiicial control of the music taught 
to the young, that it may not fail to 
secure the elevating results which it is 
capable of producing.* 

• The moral part of the education given in an Athenian 
school, so far as it concerned propriety of behaviour rather 
than justness of views, or temperance and courage of spirit, 
"was summed up under the name iVKocfiia. To this Plato in 
the Protagoras attaches much importance, and even says 
(speaking under the person of Protagoras), dg SiSaaKaXuiv 
irifiiTovrtQ [ot Trariptt;] iroXi) ftaWov ivriXkovrat sTri^tXuadai 
tvKoaixiag twv iraiduiv ij ypafifiaruyv t( koI Kidopi<Ttu>Q (p. 
325 D). A graphic sketch of the points which were con- 



8o EDUCA TION AT A THENS. 

In the earlier days of the Athenian 
State, the education of a boy was con- 
sidered complete when he had acquired 



sidered essential to (vKovftia is given in the /ocus classicus 
on Athenian education in Aristoph. Nub. 961-983. From 
this it appears that a modest silence, a reserved behaviour in 
the streets, a decent position in sitting, and an absence of 
greediness at meals, were regarded as distinguishing features 
of a well-trained boy. 

It is probable that both branches of ^ovtriic}), letters and 
music, were often taught by the same master (Cp. Ar. Eq. 
181, with Kock's note) ; but for gymnastics, as we see from 
the passage in the Clouds, boys went to a different master, 
the iratforpi/3»jf. Cramer (Geschichte der Erziehung, i. 287) 
regards this profession as one peculiar to Athens ; but he 
assigns no authority, nor is such a limitation probable from 
the nature of the case. As compared with Sparta, where 
the physical training of the youth of the nation was con- 
ducted wholly by State officials, it is certain that private 
teachers of gjTnnastics were far more numerous at Athens ; 
but all our evidence goes to show that they were common in 
every town of Greece. Whether there was any difference 
between the iraidoTpifSjjg and the yvfivatTTri^ is not clear : 
from the words of Aristotle {jrapaSoTkov tovq iralSag yvfi- 
vacricy kui 7rai5orpi/3ie^* tovtmv yap 17 fiiv ■yroidp riva 
TTQul rfiv 'i^iv Tov ffiofiarog rj dk to. tpya — Pol. v. [viii.] 3, 2) 
it seems that the one was especially concerned with the 
general health and vigour of his pupils, the other with their 
skill and agility in the performance of gymnastic feats. But 
the terms are often interchanged. Still after the very careful 
discussion by Becker and Hermann (Charikles, ii. 185-194) 
it seems probable that the gymnasium was especially devoted 
to the amusement of men, the palaestra to the training of 
boys. [Mr. Jebb, in his charming edition of Theophrastus 
(P- 237), makes the distinction to consist rather in the fact 
that the palaestra was strictly only a school for boxing and 
wrestling, while the gymnasium properly meant a place of 
more general resort and more various resources, including 



THE SOPHISTS, 8i 

the elements of gymnastics and of music* 
Naturally, the process of training was 
continued longer in some cases than in 
others. In a passage already quoted Plato 
tells us, what we might have argued 
from analogy, that the sons of wealthier 
citizens remained at school longer than 
those -of the poorer ones; and probably 
some of them continued their studies 
until the time for their solemn admission 
into the ranks of the -irtpCirokoi, when they 
were enrolled, each in his own deme, 
presented with a shield and spear in the 
theatre before the assembled people, and 



grounds for running and archery, javelin-ranges, baths, &c.] 
It would lead us too far from the present subject to enter 
upon a consideration of the particular exercises practised in 
the palaestra. There is a very graphic description of these 
in the Anacharsis of Lucian ; and the whole question is 
exhaustively discussed by Hermann, Privatalt. pp. 296-304. 
And it is happily needless to dwell upon the serious moral 
evils that attended upon them so often — 

Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa. 
« Aristotle tells us (Pol. v. (viii.) 2) that to the three main 
branches of education, letters, gj'mnastics, and music, some 
added a fourth — drawing. According to Plin. H.N. xxxv. 
17, this was owing to the influence of Pamphilus of Sicyon 
(Flor. B.C. 390-350) : Pamphili auctoritate efFectum est 
Sicyone primum, deinde in tota Graecia ut pueri ingenui 
omnes artem graphicen hoc est picturam in buxo docerentur, 
recipereturque ars ea in primum gradura artium liberalium. 

G 



82 EDUCA TION AT A THENS, 

Cp. Scho. required to take an oath of obedience to 

mann,Alterth. , i . , r-. •»-» 

i. 372, where the laws and devotion to the State. Per- 
the oath are haps the more elaborate training in the 
^^^^"' use of arms, in the art of war, and in 

the elements of drawing, which we find 
mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, was 
The Sophists, already known. But it is with the 
appearance of the Sophists that we have 
the first intimations of an3rthing like a 
regular system of higher education. This 
is not the place for any attempt at a full 
discussion of the character and work of that 
remarkable class of men. Since the appear- 
ance of Mr. Grote's justly famous chapter 
on the subject, the question has been so 
thoroughly discussed, from every point of 
view, by Mr. Cope, Mr. Lewes, Dr. Scho- 
mann, Dr. Zeller, Sir A. Grant, Professor 
Campbell, Professor Jowett, and Mr. Henry 
Sidgwick, that nothing less than an essay 
devoted to the purpose would be sufficient 
to state and examine the various argu- 
ments that have been adduced. I must 
be content here to express my full con- 
journaiof currence in the words of Mr. Sidgwick, 

Philology, , ^ , ,,t i ' r 

vol. iv. p. 288. that Grote s account " has the merit of a 



% 



THE SOPHISTS. 83 

historical discovery of the highest order," 
and that *'the main substance of his con- 
clusions is as clear and certain as anything 

of the kind can possibly be." The general Their cha- 
racter and 
purport of his views I take to be some- influence. 

what as follows : that towards the middle 
of the fifth century before Christ, various 
teachers appeared in different parts *of 
Greece, most of whom were, at some time 
of their life, attracted to Athens as the 
centre of the highest Hellenic life; that 
they judged the traditional system of 
education to be imperfect in many ways, 
and capable of being supplemented by in- 
struction of considerable value for practical 
life; that this instruction they professed 
themselves able to give, and willing to 
give for money; that in doing so some 
of their number took up with superficial 
and dangerous views of truth which drew 
upon them the imsparing hostility of men 
like Sokrates and Plato, while the way in 
which they ran counter to popular pre- 
judices, and above all the fact that they 
received pay for their teaching, exposed 
them to the ill-will of the uneducated ; but 



84 EDUCA TION AT A THENS. 

that it is equally erroneous to regard them 
as a sect with any common agreement as 
to doctrines, and as consciously and with- 
out exception teaching immorality. It can- 
not be denied, I think, that their method 
of investigation was as a rule deficient 
in depth and thoroughness; that it was 
often dangerous ; that it contributed some- 
thing to the decay of morality at Athens, 
and would have contributed more if it had 
not been for the resolute opposition of the 
Socratic schools ; and that Plato was fully 
justified in much, if not all, his polemics 
against their prevailing tendencies. Nor, 
on the other hand, can we doubt their 
Their in- services to the developement of the higher 
tZli^for education of the time. It would not have 
^^^^' been a little if the bold speculations of 

some of their number on ethics and politics 
had done nothing more than call up the 
more thorough and far-reaching discus- 
sions of Plato and Aristotle. There is a 
very real sense in which men like Pro- 
tagoras, Prodikus, and even Gorgias and 
Hippias, are to be called the fathers of 
moral philosophy rather than Sokrates. 



THE SOPHISTS. 85 

It was not he who called down philosophy 
from the heights to dwell among men; 
but finding her already directed by the 
Sophists to the business of the agora 
and the home, he guided her by his 
shrewd common-sense and unfailing de- 
votion to righteousness to the method 
whereby she might deal with it aright. 
The step from the era of " unconscious Cp. Stirling. 

Notes to 

morality " {Sittlichkett^ as the Germans call Schwegler, 
it) to that of philosophical morality [Mo^ 
ralttdt)y when moral precepts rest no 
longer upon tradition, but upon " a system Grote's Plato, 

i. vi. 

of reasoned truth/' must, of necessity, be 
accompanied by much shaking of accepted 
beliefs, by much scepticism, unreasonable 
as well as reasonable; but for all that 
the step is imperatively needful for the 
progress of the race. Traditional morality 
is secure only so long as it is unimpugned ; 
at the first assault with the weapons of 
reason, it must furnish itself with arms 
of the same temper and forging, if it is 
to hold its own. It is probable, nay 
almost certain, that Plato exaggerates 
the shameless audacity of men like Thra- 



86 ED UCA TION AT A THENS. 

symachus and Polus; yet it cannot be 
doubted that the Gorgias and the Re- 
public, and we may even add the Nico- 
machean Ethics and the Politics, are the 
immediate outcome of the speculations 
The study of first set on foot by the Sophists. But 
their contributions to the advance of know- 
ledge were not wholly indirect. The im- 
portance which was commonly assigned 
to dialectic and rhetoric naturally led to 
a closer study of the nature of words and 
sentences ; and hence we find the begin- 
nings of the science of grammar attributed 
to some of the leading Sophists. Prota- 
goras was the first to discuss the gender 
of substantives, the tenses (/u-cpry -^^poviav) and 
the modality of propositions,* and gene- 
ra,lly the correctness of diction [opBoiiriia — 
Plat. Phaedr. 267 c). Prodikus — as we 
learn from Plato's delicious parodies — 



* Cp. Zeller, Philosophic der Griechen, i. 787 : " Prota- 
goras und Prodikus — die ersteu Begriinder einer wissen- 
schaftlichen Sprachforschung bei den Griechen gewerden 
sind." It is commonly said that he discussed the moods, and 
Zeller (u.s. note 5) defends this view ; but Spengel (Suvaywy?/ 
rexvwv, p, 44) and Benfey — Geschichte der Sprachwisscn- 
schaft (p. hi) — have, I think, clearly disproved it. 



THE SOPHISTS. 87 

taught the distinctions between synony- 
mous terms, not without a certain over-re- 
finement and conscious affectation. Hippias 
laid down rules for correctness in language 
generally, but especially with reference to 
rhythm, and to the powers of the several 

letters (ypa/x/Aarwv 8wa/A€t<»-). And there was Cp. Benfey, 

Geschichle, 

hardly one of the more prominent Sophists p. 112 
who did not leave behind him a treatise on 
rhetoric {rexyq). The fragments of these 
have been collected in an early work of 
Leonard Spengel's, Swayoy^ tc^^vwv. So 
deeply did the new studies strike root 
into the higher Athenian education, that 
Antisthenes, who was at once a pupil of 
Sokrates and of Gorgias, says apxri TratScvtrcws 
17 Toiv ovo^droiv cttictkci/^i?;* and the eamestness 
with which the Platonic Sokrates re- 
peatedly utters his warnings against the 



♦ At the same time we have abundant proof of the 
general ignorance of grammar in the fact that Plato again 
and again introduces its elementary conceptions as novelties 
to his hearers. Cp. Phileb. 18 B ; Cratyl. 424 C ; Theaet. 
203 B ; and see especially the curious difficulty with which 
the very intelligent Theaetetus follows the grammatical illus« 
trations of the Elean in Sophistes, pp. 261-262. Cp. Witt- 
mann, Erziehung und Unterricht bei Platon. p. 22, and 
Grote's Plato, ii. 434. 



88 EDUCATION AT ATHENS. 

danger of deriving a knowledge of things 
solely from their names, is a sufficient) 
proof of the great influence of the So-( 
phistic methods. If further evidence were 
wanted, it would be supplied by the jests 
of Aristophanes (Nub. 662, 599} and by 
the fact that the comic poet Kallias wrote 
a TpafifjiaTLKT] TpaytpSia on purpose to turn 
them into ridicule.* Of the interest which 
the presence of one of the famous 
Sophists caused at Athens we have a 
well-known and extremely graphic de- 
scription at the beginning of Plato's Pro- 
Thehightr tagoras. It is plain that as early as the 
time of the Peloponnesian war a new 
element had been introduced into Athenian 
education, which for nearly a thousand 

♦ Cramer, on the other hand (Geschichte der Erziehung, 
ii. p. 212), considers that the object of Kallias was rather to 
encourage the introduction of the new Ionian alphabet, which, 
in 403, was officially substituted for the old Cadmean alphabet 
of sixteen letters ; and that he endeavoiu-ed to give to gram- 
matical rules a certain attractiveness by throwing them into 
the form of verse. I have not had an opportunity of con- 
sulting Welcker's paper ** Das ABC-buch des Kallias in 
Form einer Tragodie," in the Rhein. Museum, I. i. 137, &c. 
But Kallias is certainly best known as a comic poet. Dr. 
Schmitz, however (in Diet. Biog. i. v.), considers it doubtful 
whether the comic poet is to be identified with the writer of 
the rpaft/uirtKi) Tpay^^ta. 



learning. 



THE SOPHISTS. 89 

years was never to be wanting to it. Not 
recognised by the Government — at least 
till a later date — and owing their attrac- 
tion solely to their reputation for su- 
perior learning or ability, the long series 
of Sophists, rhetoricians, and philoso- 
phers continued to give that instruction 
in the higher learning which, found no- 
where else in equal fulness, was destined 
to keep alive, far into the Christian cen- 
turies, the fame of Athens as the univer- 
sity of the civilised world. The general 
nature, tendency, and results of their teach- 
ing would furnish a theme of the highest 
interest. For, indeed, it woul^ be little 
less than tHe history of the completest 
culture given to the human intellect during 
a period of surpassing importance. It 
would comprise all the most hopeful, 
sober, resolute, and finally despairing at- 
tempts of human philosophy to solve for 
itself the mysteries of life and death, of 
man and of the world around him, before 
the "dayspring from on high" visited us, 
and the " Sun of Righteousness " arose 
with healing in His wings on a weary, 



90 ED UCA TION AT A THENS. 

sin-sick earth. But the theme would lead 
us far away from our present subject, 
and, indeed, it would need no little cour- 
age to attempt it. We must simply take 
notice of the fact that above and beyond 
the training of the palaestra and the 
school, there was an education open to 
every free-born Athenian youth, which, 
for the untrammelled play which it gave 
to the highest powers of reason and 
fancy on the most important themes, for 
the keen rivalry of opposing schools, for 
the acuteness, and in many cases the 
moral earnestness, of the teachers, for 
• the free intercourse which it promoted 
among students from every part of the 
Hellenic world, has been rarely if ever 
equalled. The early training of the Athe- 
nian boys in grammar and music (as the 
words were at that time understood), 
developed a refinement of taste which 
became instinctive ; the close and con- 
stant study of the poets of their country 
filled their minds with noble thoughts and 
beautiful fancies ; and the assiduous prac-> 
tice of gymnastics shaped and moulded 



THE CIVIC LIFE. 91 

frames of manly grace and vigour. But 
that which made the Athenian intellect 
what it was, which lent it its unrivalled 
suppleness, and created its unfailing ver- 
satility, was not so much the formal 
training of boyhood, as the daily inter- 
course of the youthful citizen with acute 
and disciplined philosophers. 

Again, we should fail to take account oi influence of 

the national 

a most important element in Athenian edu- life. 
cation if we passed over wholly in silence 
the results upon the younger men of 
the richness of the common national life. 
When critics like Johnson sneered at the 
Athenians as ignorant barbarians, he was 
not answered by enumerating the schools 
that abounded in Athens, and culling 
from ancient writers references to the ex- 
tent and completeness of the training in 
grammar and rhetoric. But he was re- 
minded that " to be a citizen was to be a 
legislator — a soldier — a judge, — one upon 
whose voice might depend the fate of the 
wealthiest tributary state, of the most 
important public man."* An Athenian's 
• Cp. Macaulay's ♦* Essay on the Athenian Orators," and 



92 ED UCA TION ATA THJENS. 

books were few, but those which he had 
were the wTitings of the poets whom the 
consentient voices of all later civilisation 
have pronounced to be unrivalled models. 
And they were known with a thoroughness 
which outweighed a thousandfold in its 
value for mental discipline the hasty 
skimming of innumerable newspapers and 
pamphlets. But above all things the 
Athenian of the age of Perikles was 
living in an atmosphere of unequalled 
genius and culture. He took his way 
past the temples where the friezes of 
Phidias seemed to breathe and struggle, 
under the shadow of the colonnades 
reared by the craft of Iktinus or Kal- 
likrates and glowing with the hues of 
Polygnotus, to the agora where, like his 
Aryan forefathers by the shores of the 
Caspian, or his Teutonic cousins in the 
forests of Germany, he was to take his 
part as a free man in fixing the fortunes 
of his country. There he would listen, 

Curtius Hist. ii. 415 : "A constitution founded in a spirit of 
sublime wisdom, and having in view the participation of the 
whole civic community in public life, necessarily and of itself 
became, in the fullest sense of the word, a public discipline.'* 



THE CIVIC LIFE. 93 

with the eagerness of one v/ho knew that 
all he held most dear was trembling in 
the balance, to the pregnant eloquence 
of Perikles. Or, in later times, he would 
measure the sober prudence of Nikias 
against the boisterous turbulence of Kleon, 
or the daring brilliance of Alkibiades. 
Then, as the Great Dionysia came round 
once more with the spring-time, and the sea 
was open again for traffic, and from every 
quarter of Hellas the strangers flocked for 
pleasure or business, he would take his Cp. Becker's 
place betimes in the theatre of D;onysius, i. scene x! 
and gaze from sunrise to sunset on the 
successive tragedies in which Sophokles, 
and Euripides, and Ion of Chios, were 
contending for the prize of poetry. Or, 
at the lesser festivals, he would listen to 
the wonderful comedies of Eupolis, Aris- 
tophanes, or the old Kratinus, with their 
rollicking fun and snatches of sweetest 
melody, their savage attacks on personal 
enemies and merry jeers at well-known 
cowards or wantons, and, underlying all, 
their weighty allusions and earnest poli- 
tical purpose. As he passed through the 



94 EI> UCA TION AT A THENS. 

market-place, or looked in at one of the 
wrestling schools, he may have chanced to 
come upon a group of men in eager conver- 
sation, or hanging with breathless interest 
on the words of one of their number; and 
he may have found himself listening to an 
harangue of Gorgias, or to a fragment of 
the unsparing dialectic of Sokrates. What 
could books do more for a man who was 
receiving an education such as this ? " It 
was what the student gazed on, what he 
heard, what he caught by the magic of 
sympathy, not what he read, which was 
J. H. New- the education furnished by Athens/' Not 

man, His- ... . ^ ■, t^ 

toricai by her disctplt7iey like bparta and Rome, 

p. 40. * but by the unfailing charm of her gracious 
influence y did Athens train her children. 
The writer whose words have just been 
quoted, has summarized, with all his wonted 
perfection of diction, the famous passage 
in the funeral speech of Perikles, and his 
language may fitly express the better side 
of that ideal of life to which Athenian 
Character of education was directed: "While in pri- 

Athenian li/e» •• a i . 

vate and personal matters, each Athenian 
was suffered to please himself, without 



A THENIAN CHARA CTER. 95 

any tyrannous public opinion to make 
him feel uncomfortable, the same freedom 
of will did but unite the people, one and 
all, in concerns of national interest, be- 
cause obedience to the magistrates and 
the laws was with them a sort of passion, 
to shrink from dishonour an instinct, 
and to- repress injustice an indulgence. 
They could be splendid in their feasts 
and festivals without extravagance, be- 
cause the crowds whom they attracted 
from abroad repaid them for the outlay ; 
and such large hospitality did but cherish 
in them a frank, unsuspicious and coura- 
geous spirit, which better protected them 
than a pile of state secrets and exclusive 
laws. Nor did this joyous mode of life 
relax them as it might relax a less noble 
race ; for they were warlike without effort 
and expert without training, and rich in 
resource by the gift of nature, and after 
their fill of pleasure they were only more 
gallant in the field, and more patient 
and enduring on the march. They cul- 
tivated the fine arts with too much taste 
to be expensive, and they studied the 



96 EDUCA TION A T ATJ^ENS. 

sciences with too much point to be effemi- 
nate: debate did not blunt their energy, 
nor foresight of danger chill their daring : 
but as their tragic poet expresses it, *the 
loves were the attendants upon wisdom, 
and had a share in the acts of every 
Newman, virtue.' *' It is needless to say that there 
Sketches, pp. is another side to the picture. A purely 
^~ ^' laissez-faire policy in education is not 

likely to be wholly successful, even under 
the most favouring circumstances ; and 
there are darker shades to be added to 
the painting, before we can accept it as 
Influence and a just delineation. The attraction of in- 
compared. fluence tells, as nothing else will, with 
those who are nobly-minded; and the 
unfettered "Lem- und Lehr-Freiheit,*' 
which has long been the boast of Ger- 
many, and to which our own English 
universities are happily making some ap- 
proaches, is capable of producing results 
more valuable than any which discipline 
can attain to. But for the mass of men 
something more is needed than the simple 
charms of knowledge and virtue to con- 
strain them to the steady and strenuous 



DECLINE OF A THENS, 97 

pursuit which is needful to achieve success. 
We may well believe that, as Spartan 
apologists were compelled to admit, a 
good Athenian was a better man than 
the best of Spartans. And yet we may 
see that many a young Athenian citizen 
would have been far better for something 
of the stern control which marked the 
discipline of Lacedaemon. The evils that 
arose as freedom degenerated into license 
were felt all the more deeply in a city 
where the only guard of the laws was 
the tone of public opinion. All that a 
genuine lover of the free Attic life, like 
Curtius, can venture to say is that **the 
old Attic culture which had proved its 
worth during the troubles of the Persian 
wars, the ancient morality and piety, had 
retained their dominion as late as the days 
of Pericles, even without the binding force 
of laws such as held sway at Sparta."* 
In the time of Plato and Aristotle the 
danger of the Athenian tendency to indivi- 

• The repeated attacks of Aristophanes on the corruption 
of the youth of his own time are of course exaggerations ; 
but they cannot have been without a very considerable basis 
of reality. 

H 



98 



EDUCA TION AT A THENS, 



The Stoics 
and the Epi- 
cureans fore- 
shadowed. 



dual freedom of thought and action, had 
clearly presented itself to the view of every 
thinker: and hence we shall find them 
tending rather towards the institutions of 
her rival. We may see perhaps in the 
educational systems of Athens and Sparta 
respectively some foreshadowing of the 
two great schools of philosophy that were 
afterwards to divide between them so large 
a portion of the Hellenic and Roman world. 
Athens appears to have learnt beforehand 
the philosophy of Epicurus — the identity 
of goodness with beauty and joy — and 
the strength and the weakness of Epicu- 
reanism were hers. We find on the one 
hand the winning grace of life, the genial 
ease, the kindly brightness which lend so 
much attraction to the figures of Epicurus 
himself and the best of his followers — 
we need refer only to Vergil and Horace ; 
but on the other hand we have a license 
that readily degenerates into licentious- 
ness, an indulgence of the purer impulses 
of the heart that too soon passes into an 
indulgence of each and all. The identifi- 
cation of virtue with happiness leads very 



DANGERS OF THE SYSTEM 99 

quickly to the identification of pleasure 
with virtue; the love of the Beautiful 
becomes the love of the Sensual ; and 
the pursuit of that which is most alluring 
lasts, even when goodness has lost her 
power to be held as such. Sparta, on 
the other hand, tended towards that rigid 
suppression of natural desires, and that 
absolute submission to external law, which 
formed the strength of Stoicism, just as 
their exaggeration proved in the long run 
its fatal weakness. There were many, un- 
doubtedly, to whom the rigid discipline 
of Sparta, or the severe ascetism of the 
Porch, was safer than a freer and a more 
genial system ; but as on the one hand 
the virtue that was the product of Law 
fell short of the goodness that sprang 
from a love of the ideal Good,* so, on the 
other, the attempt to impose on all man- 
kind a burden greater than they could 
bear of necessity led to a fierce reaction, 
which broke the bonds of every law. 

* It is needless to say that men like Epictetus and Marcus 
Aurelius cannot be considered as Stoics proper. Though 
nominally followers of Zeno and Cleanthes, they aie reaiiy 
Eclectics in the most attractive part of their philosophy. 



1 00 EDUCA TION AT A THENS: 

The evils of license are great, but it may- 
be fairly doubted whether they are not 
less in magnitude and permanence than 
those which result from unnatural and 
tyrannous restrictions. The rule of Sparta 
was shorter and far more brutal than that 
of Athens ; her fall was greater, her ruin 
more utter and irretrievable. 




CHAPTER III. 

PLATO ON NATIONAL EDUCATION. 

|E have now completed our survey 
of the popular theories of educa- 
tion in the two great typical 
Greek communities, and of the 
manner in which they were carried into 
practice ; it remains that we should consi- 
der more in detail the views of the leading 
Athenian thinkers of the century with 
which we are especially dealing. 

Xenophon need not long delay us. It is Xenophcn's 

.. .. ., limited vie-iiui, 

true that his Kyropaedia, if not actually 
written, as some authorities inform us, in 
opposition to the Republic of Plato, has • 
this much in common with that great work, 
that the writer endeavours to set forth (in 
this case under the transparent disguise of 
a historical fiction) his views on the ideal 
constitution anc' government of a State. 



1 02 PL A TO ON ED UCA TION, 

But the paternal despotism of a v/ise and 
virtuous prince, and not the rule of a 
highly cultivated body of philosophers, was 
the government which commended itself to 
the judgment of the gallant but somewhat 
narrow-minded mercenary ; and the Per- 
sian laws, which he regards w^ith so much 
approval, aim only at rearing skilful, brave, 
temperate, and above all obedient, soldiers* 
Of any higher education than that which is 
needful for the production of useful tools in 
war, there is hardly a trace to be found. 
The training of the intellect was limited to 
the cultivation of a certain power of ex- 
plaining the grounds of action (Kyrop. i. 
4, 3). The Persians are not supposed to 
know their letters, to hear or recite any 
poetry, or even to learn the use of any 
ideen, &c., ii. musical instrument. And Heeren has 
shown that even this meagre training was 
intended only for the members of an exclu- 
sive caste. None were to be admitted to it 
but those who were placed by circum- 
stances beyond the necessity of working 
for their daily bread. It is needless to 
point out the want of analytical and specu- 



ARISTOTLE'S METHOD. 103 

11 lative power, and the inferior knowledge of 
human nature, which make this treatise 
hardly deserving of mention by the side of 
the master-works of the Lyceum and the 
Academy. 

Plato and Aristotle both attached the importance cf 

education 

greatest importance to education, and dwelt with Piato 
upon it at considerable length. With both, 
the establishment of a perfect common- 
wealth was regarded as the ultimate object 
of all the speculations of philosophy ; inas- 
much as it was only in the midst of the 
favourable conditions afforded by a perfect 
State that the complete happiness and 
virtue of the individual could be realised. 
But the first requisite for the perfection 
of the State is a well-ordered system of 
education. And so Aristotle, after dis- Aristotle's 

viethodt 

cussing in the Nicomachean Ethics the 
supreme good of the individual, and the 
laws of his highest excellence, proceeds in 
his Politics to sketch out his conception of 
an ideal State.* As usual with him, a certain 
amount of attention is given first to a purely 

* That it is an ideal State has been shown, against 
objectors, by Zeller, ii. 2, 570. 



104 



PL A TO ON EDUCA TION, 



negative criticism of previous attempts in 
the same direction ; but he proceeds only 
a very little way in the constructive portion 
of his work before he takes up the question 
of education, and assigns nearly a book 
and a half to its consideration, although his 
treatment of the subject is evidently frag- 
mentary.* And Plato's matured and sys- 
tematic expression of his views on education 
is thrown into the same form in his Republic 
TTie Republic and Laws. These two great works differ 

and the Laws, , 

so considerably in style, in power, and in 
many points of detail, that some have been 
tempted to deny the genuineness of the 
latter. But after the defence of the Laws 
by Stallbaum, Grote, and Jowett, and the 
recantation by Zeller of his former ex- 
tremely able attack, we may fairly consider 
all doubts removed. The important dis- 
crepancies seem to be fully accounted for 
by the different conditions under which the 
dialogues were written, and the different 
objects which they had in view. In the 



Cp. his 
Platonische] 
Studien, 
1-131, with 
his Ges- 
chichte, ii. 
I. 348, 615, 
641. 



• It will be seen that I follow the rearrangement of the 
books of the Politics adopted by St. liilaire and Congreve. 
Cp. Zeller, ii. 2, 523. 



REPUBLIC AND LA WS. 1 05 

Republic, undoubtedly a work of Plato's 
prime, the philosopher endeavours, with 
little or no regard to the possibilities of 
actual life, to draw out a scheme of that 
polity, which should be ideally favourable 
to the develop ement of virtue, and therefore 
of happiness. The Laws we may with 
equal certainty pronounce to be the product 
of his extreme old age. He no longer 
aims at that which is the best conceivable;* 
but he draws out a system of legislation 
for a colony which he supposes it is intended 
to found in a certain place in Crete. There 
is not only a striking failure of artistic 
power in the later treatise, a senile garrulity 
and discursiveness, a marked deficiency in 
the infinite grace, humour, and dramatic 
skill that illuminate his earlier writings, 
but there is also a hard and bitter tone, 
and above all a narrow dogmatism strangely 
unlike his former joyous confidence in the 
healthful results of the free play of reason 
in dialectics. It will, therefore, be needful- 

• Strictly speaking, even the Republic does not give what 
Plato considered absolutely best ; e.g. communism is limited 
to the Guardians, instead of being extended to the whole 
community. Cp. Grote's Plato, iii. 207 and note. 



1 06 PL A TO ON ED UCA TION, 

for us in many cases to distinguish the 
theories of the Laws from those of the 
Republic ; and not to speak hastily of any 
views as held by Plato, unless at the same 
time we determine to what portion of his 
life and to what stage in his thought we are 
to assign them. 

The Republic. It has been often said that the Republic 
is essentially a treatise on education, and 

Mr. Maurice the Statement has much truth in it. But 

characteristi- . i«/- • 

caiiy objects it necds one very important qualiiication. 
limited defini- All that has been said above of the limited 
Anc. Phil. sense in which we can speak of a national 
1 • I '3 (e .4^. g(j^(.^|.jQj^ ij^ Greece is true, in a still higher 

degree, of the conception of it held by Plato. 
Dividing the citizens of his ideal state into 
Rulers, or Guardians, Auxiliaries, and 
Commons, he provides a very careful and 
thorough education for the first class, and 
a rigorous training, up to a certain point, 
for the second, but the third, which will 
naturally be by far the largest, he leaves 
wholly without provision. It is true that 
Cp. Grote's he docs not exclude them from membership 

Plato, iii. 212. ^ , _ A • 1 -I 1 

of the State, as Aristotle does ; on the 
contrary, the laborious and self-denying 



HIS VIEWS OF SPARTA, 107 

training of the Guardians is mainly intended 
to secure the happiness of the Commons, 
and the chief enjoyment which the former 
have to expect is the consciousness of doing 
their duty. Still the education sketched 
out in the Republic is the education of a 
small class, and the Demos is in this 
respect wholly neglected. It is one of the 
most curious points about the Republic 
that Plato passes over almost wholly in 
silence the condition of what after all he 
must have considered would have formed 
the great majority of the citizens. 

We have noticed before (p. 53) the great The extent of 

his admiration 

attraction which the Spartan institutions /^r^/arfa. 
seem to have had for Plato, He is entirely Cp. Jowett's 

. , , -111 -I PiatOj ii' 137- 

at one with them on the absolute control 
which the State is to exercise over the 
training and the manner of life of every 
citizen. And yet, as Mr. Grote has acutely 
noticed, it is rather the Athenian type of 
character which he aims at producing, and 
the common Athenian instruments of edu- Cp. Grote, 

Plato, iii. 

cation which he approves. The excessive 175, 178. 
devotion of the Spartans to gymnastics, 
and their neglect of music in its wider 



io8 PLA TO ON EDUCA TION, 

sense, he censures as likely to make men 
good warriors, but not good citizens. A 
man who gives himself up unduly to 
gymnastics, **ends by becoming a hater 
of philosophy, uncultivated, never using 
the weapon of persuasion ; he is like a 
wild beast, all violence and fierceness, and 
knows no other way of dealing ; and he 
lives in all ignorance and evil conditions, 
Repub. iii. and has no sense of propriety or grace/* 

411 (Towett). _ , , , ,.ri ■. ^. «/. 

On the other hand, if he devotes himself 
too much to music, he is apt to become 
** melted and softened beyond what is good 
for him ; " " the passion of his soul is melted 
out of him, and what may be called the 
nerves of his soul are cut away, and he 
becomes but a feeble warrior;** he may even 
grow irritable, violent, and very discon- 
tented. Therefore it is necessary that 
throughout life these two means of educa- 
tion should be kept in due proportion to 
each other, so that each side of the nature 
of man may be fitly trained and developed. 
The birth and With Plato, as with Lycurgus, the care 

TCdTXTt^ of 

children. of the children of the State begins before 
their birth. Rigid rules are laid down for 



REGULA TION OF MARRIA GE, 1 09 

the regulation of marriage. The limits of 
age within which marriage for the purpose 
of procreation is allowed are strictly fixed ; 
and the care which was taken at Sparta 
that the most suitable partners should be 
brought together is carried to an extreme, 
which has always been regarded as one 
of the most impracticable and repulsive 
features of the Republic. As Mr. Jowett 
justly says : " Human nature is reduced as 
nearly as possible to the level of the 
animals. . . . All that world of poetry and 
fancy which the passion of love has called 
forth in modem literature and romance 
would have been banished by Plato. . , . 
We start back horrified from this Platonic 
ideal, in the belief, first, that the instincts 
of human nature are far too strong to be 
crushed out in this way ; secondly, that if 
the plan could be carried out, we should 
be poorly recompensed by improvements 
in the breed for the loss of the best things 
in life. The greatest regard for the least 
and meanest things of humanity — the de- 
formed infant, the culprit, the insane, the 
idiot — truly seems to us one of the noblest 



1 1 PLATO ON EDUCA TION. 

Plato, ii. results of Christianity." And yet we are 
bound to recognise in Plato's conception 
of a State regulation of marriage, involving 
as it does the degrading notion of a general 
community of wives, an honest and earnest 
attempt to struggle against some of the 
greatest and most widespread hindrances 
to the establishment of national well-being. 
It cannot be denied that there are few 
sources of vice and crime so fatally prolific 
as the manifold evils that result from im- 
provident and ill-adjusted marriages. What 
the most thoughtful and far-seeing of the 
modern reformers of society are endeavour- 
ing to secure by the creation of habits of 
self-control aided by an enlightened public 
opinion, Plato attempted to grasp at once 
by a violent subversion of the foundations 
of human society as at present constituted. 
We, who are learning in medicine to trust 
to the restorative power of nature, and are 
taught by our ablest surgeons to give up 

See the pub- the cautcry and the knife for the healing 

lished lectures . r ■.••! i 

of Mr. Hilton, magic oi rest, are not likely to sympathise 

Hosprtal with " heroic remedies.*' And yet we may 

appreciate the magnitude of the evils 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 1 1 1 

against which Plato's theories were directed, 
and the value of the advantages which 
would be among the results of their re- 
alisation. 

We must not fail to notice, however, that Limits to the 

, re situation of 

Plato himself was fully alive to the im- marriage. 
portance of giving some freedom to the 
emotions in marriage. For while he assigns 
to the Rulers the absolute determination 
of the unions which shall be permitted, he 
recognises it as one of their most difficult, 
and at the same time important duties, so 
to arrange their assignment of men and 
women to each other, that the decision may Rep. v. 40. 
appear the result of fortune, not of policy. 

The offspring of the marriages of the The nurture 
Guardians are to be removed from their "^^ ^ " 
mothers as soon as born, that no special 
attachments may be formed towards those 
who are all brought forth for the State, and 
the property of the State in common ; and 
the children of inferior parents, or those 
w^hich happen to be deformed, are to be 
made aw^ay with,* that the breed may be 

* KaraK^VTTTiKv need not necessarily bear a stronger 
meaning than that which Curtius assigns to similar espres- 



1 1 2 PLA TO ON EDUCA TION, 

maintained in vigour and purity. Those 
approved by the authorities are to be 
transferred to State nurseries, and given 
over to the nurses who dwell there ; the 
mothers are to be allowed to come and 
feed them, but the greatest care is to be 
taken that no mother recognises her own 
child. In the Laws, where Plato goes 
much more into detail than he does in the 
Republic, we find abundant precepts given 
as to the manner in which the nurses are 
to rear the children. Just as the Athenian 
bird-fanciers were accustomed to take long 
walks in the country, with their cocks and 
quails tucked under their arms, for the sake 
of health, "that is to say, not their own 
health, but the health of the birds;" so 
the children are to be kept constantly in 
motion. "They should live, if that were 
possible, as if they were always rocking 
at sea." The nurses are to be constantly 



sions used of the Spartan custom (cp. p. lo). In Timaeus, 
p. 19 A, where there is an evident reference to this passage, 
Plato says, ** You remember how we said that the children 
of the good parents were to be brought up (©/JSTrreov), and 
the children of bad parents secretly dispersed^— d^ ri\v dXXqy 
iroXiv.** Cp. Grote's Plato, iii. 205 (note). 



THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN 113 

carrj'ing them about, and not to allow 

them to walk until they are three years 

old, that their legs may not be distorted Laws, vii. pp. 

789-790. 
from the too early use of them. He entirely 

disapproves of the common custom of 
scaring children into good behavour by 
fearful stories, and insists that only autho- 
rised tales should be used by the mothers 
and nurses. They should be kept as free Rep. ii. 377 
as possible from every pain and fear, but 
their pleasures should also be limited, in 
order that they may be preserved from 
undue excitement in either direction. Laws, vii. 792 

C-D. 

Amusements they will be able to provide Their amuse- 
for themselves abundantly, as they get 
a little older ; all that will be needful is 
that they should be brought together at 
the temples of the various villages, in the 
charge of the nurses, and under the super- 
intendence of one of the twelve women 
annually appointed for that purpose. With riieir educa- 
regard to the education which is to be 
given to them, when they are of the proper 
age — an age which Plato considers to begin 
at seven years — he expressly says that it 
would be difi&cult to find a better than the 



1 14 PLA TO ON EDUCATION. 

Rep. ii. 376. old-fashioned sort, that is, gymnastics for 
the body and music for the soul. The first 
three years are to be given up mainly to 
gymnastics : though the laudatory manner 
in which he refers to the Egyptian custom 
of teaching children the principles of 
arithmetic by means of games (Laws, vii. 
819), shows us that he would not have 
objected to some intermixture of mental 
training with the physical : but the regular 
study of letters was not to begin before ten 
years of age, and only three years were to be 
assigned to it ; at thirteen years a boy was 
to take in hand the lyre, and at this he 
might continue for another three years, 
** neither more nor less : and whether his 
father or himself liked or disliked the study, 
he was not to be allowed to spend more or 
less time in learning music than the law 
Strictness oj allowed" (Laws, vii. 810). Throughout 
su;pervtswfu ^^ whole of his period of pupilage the 

strictest supervision and discipline were to 
be exercised. " For neither sheep nor 
any other animals ought to live without 
a shepherd, nor ought boys to live without 
tutors (TratSaytoyoi) any more than slaves 



STRICTNESS OF SUPERVISION, 115 

without masters. And of all creatures the 
boy is the most unmanageable. For, inas- 
much as he has in him a spring of reason 
not yet regulated, he is the most insidious, 
sharp, and insubordinate of creatures. So 
that he must be bound with many bridles : 
in the first place, when he gets away from 
mothers and nurses, he must be under the 
control of tutors, because of his childishness 
and foolishness ; and then again as being 
free-bom, he must be kept in check by 
those who have anything to teach him, 
and by his studies ; but as being, on the 
other hand, in the position of a slave, any cp. s. Paul, 
of the free-bom citizens may punish him, ^^^l^ 'u,iip' 
ay, and his tutor and teacher, if any oifll^f^Z;:,, 
them do anything wrong; and he who ''?,'"°'':'"T"' 
comes across him and does not inflict upon ^ofXov, Kypwg 

TaVTlOV MV. 

him the punishment which he deserves, 
shall incur the greatest disgrace ; and that 
one of the guardians of the laws who has 
been selected to govern the children, must 
look after any one who has fallen in with 
the cases we have mentioned, and has 
failed to inflict punishment, or has in- 
flicted it improperly: and we must have 



1 1 6 PL A TO ON EDUCA TION. 

him always looking out sharply and with 
especial care to the training of the children, 
directing their natures, and always turning 
them towards the good, in accordance with 
the laws." (Laws, vii., 808-9). 
Detailed re- It is characteristic of the dogmatic and 

gulations in i . , i i t 

the Laxvs. despotic tone which marks the Laws 
throughout that very little freedom of 
action is given to the national Minister 
bf Education. "As far as possible the 
law ought to leave nothing to him, but 
to explain everything, that he may be the 
interpreter and tutor of others." Hence 
the multiplicity of details as to the time 
to be spent in the various studies, the 
rhythms to be allowed in the poems learnt. 

Boys and and the dances to be practised. In the 

girls trained 

alike. Republic Plato insists that the same edu- 

cation should be given to boys and girls, 
that both alike should be trained to be 
guardians of the State, and that both 
should practise the exercises of the pa- 
laestra. He is aware of the ridicule that 
such a proposal will bring upon him; 
but inasmuch as nature has not made man 
and woman to differ in kind of excellence 



BOYS AND GIRLS, 1 1 7 

but only in degree, he will be no partner 

to any arbitrary distinctions. It is idle Cp. Rep. v. 

to say that gymnastic exercises are not 

becoming to women : they are needful for 

the object he has in view ; the object is 

a worthy one, and the best of all maxims 

that are current or ever will be is that 

"that which is useful is honourable, and 

that which is harmful is disgraceful.'' But 

in the Laws he is willing to make some 

concession to what he still regards as 

the unreasonable prejudices of society, 

and though he would prefer that boys 

and girls should be trained together in 

precisely the same exercises, and with a 

view to the same functions in after life, 

he allows them to be educated separately 

after the age of six years, boys under 

the care of men, and girls under that of 

women. But he protests that this is but 

a second-best kind of polity, better than 

the Spartan system, and very much better 

than the Athenian, but after all providing Laws, vii, 

but inadequately for the well-being and 

happiness of half of the human race. In 

the Laws we- have, as we have noticed 



nS 



PL A TO ON EDUCA TION, 



Gymnasia 
and schools. 



Compulsory 
education. 



already, many more deiails as to the 
method of education than are given in 
the Republic, where the object is rathef 
to lay down the leading principles which 
are to govern it. For instance, the follow- 
ir vf passage comes from the former work, 
and has nothing corresponding to it in 
the latter: "The buildings for gymnasia 
and schools open to all are to be in three 
places in the midst of the city; and out- 
side the city and in the surrounding 
country there shall be schools for horse 
exercise, and open spaces also in three 
places, arranged with a view to archery 
^nd the throwing of missiles, at which 
young men may learn and practise. In 
these several schools let there be dwellings 
for teachers, who shall be brought from 
foreign parts by pay, and let them teach 
the frequenters of the school the art of 
war and the art of music ; and they shall 
come not only if their parents please, 
but if they do not please; and if their 
education is neglected, there shall be com- 
pulsory education of all and sundry, as 
the saying is, as far as this is possible ; 




PRINCIPLES OF TRAINING. 1 1 9 

and the pupils shall be regarded as be- 
longing to the State rather than to their 
parents." (Laws, vii. 804.) 

But it is to the Republic especially that Principles of 
we have to look for the principles on which ^ "'^^^'^'^- 
such detailed rules are ultimately based. 
Plato's theories on education are intimately r 
connected with his psychology and meta- I 
physics. For the moral training of the' 
citizen of his ideal State — a training which 
is not limited to the period of youth, but 
extends throughout the whole of life, and 
which is distinctly viewed as preparatory 
to another life in which it is to be carried 
out in fuller perfection — has for its aim see jowett's 
the proportionate and harmonious develope- p. 152.* 
ment of the various elements of the soul ; 
and his intellectual training is intended 
to fit him for the contemplation of the 
ideal Good, by the cultivation of the 
power and habit of abstraction. The soul, Ps^'choiogv of 
according to Plato, is composed of three 
parts, corresponding generally to the 
senses, the heart, and the intellect: the 
first and lowest is the concupiscent prin- 
ciple, or appetite (to eVt^/xTriKov) ; the second 



1 20 PLA TO ON EDUCA TION, 

the impulsive principle or passion (0v/xos or 
TO OvfjiO€L^€s) ; the third and highest is reason 
Rep. iv. (to XoyKTTtKov). The virtue of the first is 

temperance; the virtue of the second, 
courage ; the virtue of the third is wisdom ; 
while the supreme and crowning virtue, 
in which the others find their synthesis and 
harmony, justice, or rather perhaps right- 
nesSy\% only attained to when "the appetites 
whose object is sensual pleasure, and the 
Dr. Thomp. impulses that prompt to energetic action," 
Append, i. ' willingly submit to the control of a wisely- 
^* ' * ruling reason. The aim of education, then, 

must be to produce in the appetites tem- 
perance, in the spirit courage, in the reason 
wisdom, and in all that harmonious co- 
operation which alone is worthy of the 
Use of myths, name of justice. The earliest instrument 
employed for the training of children con- 
Rep, ii. 377. sists of myths or fictitious stories. Here 
Plato accepts the common practice of his 
time; but of the majority of the fables 
used he. strongly disapproves. For some 
of them, he says, tend to corrupt the 
mind, by placing before it false conceptions 
of what is to be desired and what is to 



INFL UENCE OF ART AND MUSIC. 1 2 1 

be shunned ; while others, and especially 
those which describe the terrors of Hades, 
fill it with baseless and degrading fears. 
The narrative form of composition is 
especially approved ; but if poets adopt 
the mimetic or dramatic style, they are 
not to be allowed to assume the characters 
of vicious or foolish men ; no imitation 
can be suffered but that of the reason- 
able and virtuous man. In the same way, Rep. iii. 

396-398. 
artists must not venture to present before Plato's dislike 

. ^ ^^ ^^ drama 

the eyes 01 the young copies of any ugly comes out 

1 . , . 1 • 1 . . . again in the 

or unbecoming type ; their object must Laws, iv. 
be to discover and reproduce the idea of Gorg. 502^B. 
the beautiful ; so that children, having 
before them constantly various forms of 
beauty, may be fitted to receive and appre- 
ciate the influence of beautiful discourse. Rep. iii. 401. 
It is needless to repeat, after what has 
been said above, that foremost among the 
creations of art stood music, in its several 
branches of harmony, rhythm, and lyric 
verse. The power which these possess to Po-wer of 
attune the mind unconsciously to the love 
of the beautiful is dwelt upon at length. 
The reason why musical training is so 



1 22 PL A TO ON ED UCA TION. 

powerful is " because rhythm and harmony 
find their way into the secret places of 
the soul, on which they mightily fasten, 
bearing grace in their movements, and 
making the soul graceful of him who is 
rightly educated, or ungraceful if ill- 
educated; and also because he who has 
received this true education of the inner 
being will most shrewdly perceive omis- 
sions or faults in art or nature, and with 
a true taste, while he praises and rejoices 
over, and receives into his soul the good, 
and becomes noble and good, he will justly 
blame and hate the bad, now in the days 
of his youth, even before he is able 
td know the reason of the thing: and 
when reason comes he will recognise and 
salute her as a friend with whom his 
Rep. iii. education has made him long familiar/* 
jowett). This love for the beautiful, engendered by 
Platonic Eros, a rightly-ordered music, leads Plato on to 
the general question of the nature and 
results of that passionate and ecstatic 
yearning for a closer union with the beau- 
tiful, known as the Platonic Eros. To 
this, as might have been expected from 



GYMNASTICS. 123 

the writer of the Phaedrus and the Sym- 
posium, Plato attaches great importance. 
But just as we have seen already that 
there is no reason for imputing any taint 
of evil to the intimacy between the lover 
and the lover* one at Sparta — whatever 
was the case at Athens — so Plato is care- 
ful t6 preserve his conception of £ros free 
from sensuality and impurity. Then he Rep. m, 403 

T) 

passes on to the consideration of the 
gymnastics to be practised. These are 
intended only in a subordinate degree 
for the developement of the bodily powers 
(ill. 410 c); just as the main object of 
music was to infuse temperance, so gym- 
nastics is especially intended to stimulate 
the spirited {r6 Ov/xoeiBh) part of the nature 
of man, and thus to increase his courage. 
The two must be duly tempered, each 
with the other; lest on the one hand a 
boy should grow hard and fierce, or on 
the other his spirit should be melted and 
softened beyond what is good for him. 
But Plato does not think it needful to 
give prescriptions in detail as to gym- 
nastics: "if the mind be properly edu- 



124 PLATO ON EDUCATION. 

cated, the minuter care of the body may 

be committed to it ; " for " the good soul 

improves the body, and not the good 

Rep. iii. body the soul." And here he leaves the 

403 D. 

subject of the education of the greater 
number of the Guardians (in the wider 
sense in which he employs the term), 
only providing that at certain stages in 
their growth there shall be tests imposed 
Tests of the Upon them. Tasks are to be set before 

Guardians. 

them such that there is a danger of their 
forgetting their duty or being deceived; 
toils and pains and conflicts are to be 
prescribed ; and finally, they must be tried 
Rep. iii. 413. by the witcheries of pleasure " more 
thoroughly than gold is tried in the fire," 
in order to discover whether they are 
armed against all enchantments, and of 
a noble bearing always, good Guardians 
of themselves and of the music which 
they have learned, and whether they retain, 
under all circumstances, a rhythmical and 
harmonious nature, such as will be most 
serviceable to the man himself and to 
the State. And he who at every age, 
as boy and youth and in mature life, has 



HIGHER ED UCA TION. 1 2 5 

come out of the trial victorious and pure, 
shall be appointed a Ruler and Guardian 
of the State. Those who fail are to be 
degraded into the class of husbandmen 
and artisans ; but, on the other hand, 
proved and tested excellence may raise 
a man from the lower rank to that of 
Guardian or Auxiliary. Mr. Jowett ad- 
mirably notices this "career open to 
talents " as " one of the most remarkable 
conceptions of the Republic, because un- 
Greek in character and also unlike any- 
thing that existed at all in that age of 
the world." It is true that Plato says Plato, ii. 38. 
nothing of the means by which the lower 
class are to attain to the excellence which 
is so carefully cultivated in the Guardians : 
throughout the whole of the dialogue 
they fall into the background : but at 
least he does not deliberately doom them 
to entire exclusion from the higher life of 
the nation. 

The subject of the higher training to be Higher trait? - 
afforded to the select Guardians who are to 
become the Rulers of his ideal State Plato 
recurs to in the sixth and seventh books 



1 26 PL A TO ON EDUCA TION. 

of the Republic. But this does not appear 
to fall strictly within the scope of the 
present essay, and may therefore be passed 
over lightly. The main object which he 
has in view is to train the chosen few, by 
the study of philosophy, to the contempla- 
tion of the ideal Good. If they have learnt 
to know what this is, they will be able to 
recognise it under all the various forms in 
which it may present itself, and so they 

Rep. vi. 505. will be able to rule aright. " The power 
which supplies the objects of real know- 
ledge with the truth that is in them, and 
which gives to him who knows them the 
power of knowing them, we must consider 
to be the essential Form and Idea of Good, 
and we must regard this as the origin of 
science and of truth, so far as the latter 

lb. 508 D. comes within the range of knowledge.'* 
j The highest of all cognitions of the Form 
of Good is that of the Dialectician, who 
comprehends directly the pure .essence of 
Good by means of vovs or Intellect (the 
" Reason " of Kant and Coleridge) ; an 
inferior power is that of the Geometer, who 
knows the Good only through particular 



HIGHER EDUCA TION. 127 

assumptions by means of the Stavota or the ib. 510-511 
Understanding. The ordinary life of man 
is illustrated by the famous simile of cap- 
tives chained in a gloomy cave, with their 
backs turned to the opening, so that they 
can see nothing by the light of the sun, 
but only the shadows of things cast by a 
subterranean fire. The purpose of educa- 
tion is to turn men round from their 
cramped and confusing position, to enable 
them to see the glimpses of light which 
come from the world of brightness and 
realities, to induce them • to struggle up 
into the light, and to learn to look upon 
things as they really are, and then to 
descend again into the cave, that they may 
benefit those who are still imprisoned, by 

their fuller and clearer knowledge. What Rep. vii. 

514-521. 
are the studies then which are needful for 

education ? (rt av ovv iiq ixdOrj/xa ^XV'^ oXkov oltto 

Tov yiyvofievov cttI to ov ;) Music and gymnastics Subsidiary 

studies. 

are but preparatory studies, both concerned 
with the changeable and perishing; the 
useful arts are simply degrading to the 
reason. But arithmetic, if taught, not as 
it is too often with a view to practical 



128 PLA TO ON EDUCA TION. 

utility, but as a means of stimulating 
thought, and as Leading us to distrust the 
impressions of the senses, will be found 

Rep. vii. of value. " The philosopher must study 

5-5 ^• 

it, because he is bound to rise above the 

changing and cling to the real, on pain 

of never becoming a skilful reason er." The 

second study is to be geometry, pursued 

in the same manner and for a like purpose. 

Geometry of three dimensions, Plato held, 

was in his time studied absurdly ; but if 

properly taught and honoured, it would 

suitably take the next place. Treatises 

on the subject he regards, most justly from 

his own point of view, as of little value 

Cp, Grote's compared with the intellectual discipline 
Plato, i. 228 , , , A 

ami 467. furnished by a competent teacher. Astro- 
nomy takes the fourth place ; but this is 
to be studied, not by the empiric method 
of observation, but as a branch of solid 
geometry, treating of bodies in motion.* 
When the philosopher has added to these 

» Mr. Jowett notices (Plato, ii. 85) that tliis view, which 
at first sight seems so strange, is really supported by the fact 
that the greater part of astronomy at the present day consists 
of abstract dynamics, and that the most brilliant discoveries 
have been made by its means. 



DUTIES OF CIVIC LIFE. 1 29 

the theoretical study of acoustics and har- 
monics, he v/ill have been trained to see 
the common method and principle which 
pervades them all ; and so he will be pre- 
pared to enter on the crowning task of his 
life-long work, the pursuit of dialectics. It Dialectics. 
is this which gives his intellect powder to 
grasp the pure and absolute Idea of Good, 
to rise out of the darkness of the cave, and 
to gaze upon the eternal realities in the 
** white-dry" light of truth. The special 
time allotted to the commencement of 
these higher studies is the period between 
thirty and thirty-five years of age ; they Rep. vU. 539. 
should not begin them before this time ; 
for boys, when first introduced to dialectics, 
are like puppies, who delight in pulling and 
tearing to pieces with their newly-grown 
teeth all that comes in their way, merely 
for amusement's sake. At thirty-five they Practical 

duties, 

are to be constramed to return to the cave, 
as it were, and to take upon them the 
duties of practical life, subjected all the 
time to the supervision and the continual 
testing of their seniors, to see if they will 
remain steadfast in spite of every seduction. 

K 



130 PLA TO aV EDUCA TION, 

It is only when they are fifty years of age, 
that those who have passed safely through 
every temptation are to be allowed to 
resume their philosophical pursuits, and 
"to lift up the eye of the soul and fix it 
upon that which gives light to all things/' 
Yet each, when his turn comes, "is to 
devote himself to the hard duties of public 
life, and to hold office for his country's 
sake, not as a desirable, but as an un- 
avoidable occupation ; and thus having 
trained up a constant supply of others like 
themselves to fill up their place as Guardians 
of the State, they will depart and take up 
Rep. vii. 540. their abode in the islands of the blessed." 
The whole of the system of training pre- 
scribed for the Guardians is, in accordance 
with Plato's fundamental position on this 
Cp. Rep. iv. point, to be common to men and women. 
451 457- Tj^ j^^ respect is any difference to be re- 
cognised between them, except such as 
' inevitably result firom their natural dis- 
tinctions.* 

* The earnestness with which Plato aims at raising the 
education of women from the absolute neglect which it 
suffered at Athens, is selected both by Jowett and by Zeller 
(Philosophie, II. i, 570) as among his greatest excellences. 



ALTERED VIEWS. 131 

The same opinion is maintained in the Laws, vii. 

804-806. 
Laws explicitly. But m other points we Altered views 

find his views largely modified. There is ' 

no distinct class of Guardians ; their place 

is filled by a Nocturnal Council,* consisting 

of the ten oldest "guardians of the laws" 

and those of the citizens who had obtained 

prizes for \'irtue, together with those who 

had visited foreign countries (a privilege 

rarely conceded), and an equal number 

of " co-optative '* juniors. This council is 

asserted to require a special training, but 

none such is provided for it : the attempt 

which has been made in the Epinomis 

(probably by Philippus of Opus : cp. Diog. 

Laert. iii. 37) to supply the deficiency is 

certainly not genuine. f But the most 

important' point of all, is that magistrates 

are to be elected by the votes of all the 

citizens capable of military service, the Laws, vi. 755. 

• It is not easy to see from the text of Plato (Laws, xii. 
961 A) how Mr. Jowett arrives at the number of twenty-six 
for this council. 

t Mr. Grote, I believe, stands alone among modern 
scholars in his attempt to defend it ; but his interpretation 
of the words of Diogenes is to roe quite untenable. Mr. 
Jowett has no doubt upon the subject. Plato, iv. 485 and 
172*. Cp. Zeller, ii. i. 321. 



132 PLATO ON EDUCATION. 

council by universal suffrage tempered by 
a division into classes analogous to that 
prescribed by the Servian constitution at 
Rome, and even the Minister of Education, 
the most important functionary in the State, 
in Plato's view, by the votes of the 
guardians of the law, who are themselves 
chosen by the people. The absolute 
ignoring of the Demus, which is so con- 
spicuous in the Republic, is absent from 
the Laws, and the education ordained is 
Education in common to all the citizens. The lead- 

the Laws. r ^ • -. i 11 

ing features of this have been already 
pointed out (pp. 1 16-1 19).* We have every- 

* The most important difference between the teaching of 
the Republic and that of the Laws as to the higher education 
lies in the fact that in the Laws there is no mention of the 
doctrine of Ideas : " the will of God, the standard of the 
legislator, and the dignity of the soul as compared with the 
body have taken their place in the mind of Plato." On the 
other hand, even more importance is attached to the study 
of Numbers ; and this not from the practical utility of a 
knowledge of arithmetic ; this would be by far the most 
foolish of all arguments (Laws, vii. 818) ; but because they 
appertain essentially to the divine nature and to the consti- 
tution of the universe. As Zeller justly says : *' In this work 
a'.so Plato could not be content with the common training in 
music and gymnastics ; but the higher training in dialectics 
he deliberately sets aside ; it only remains for him therefore 
10 complete his system with what ought to have been only a 
preliminary stage to philosophy, a link between mere con- 
ception and philosophic thought, that is, the mathematic 



DEFECTS OF THE LA WS. 133 

where the most rigid censorship, the 
most precise prescription of duties, and, 
worse than all in the view of modem 
thinkers, an elaborate system of perpetual 
espio7iage. All the regulations are directed 
to the maintenance of the institutions of 
the legislator. Plato's noble confidence in 
the power of reason to guide to the truth (as 
expressed in passages like Phaedo, 89-91) Cp. Grote, 

1 , r . . , - I r Plato, ii. 

is exchanged tor a timid dread of entrust- 154-157. 
ing a weapon so dangerous to unskilful 
hands. Originality is in every way dis- 
couraged, and the willingness to "follow 
the argument, whithersoever it might lead," 
is sacrificed to an oppressive orthodoxy. 
The ideal of Plato w^ould have been realised 
in the boast of M. Duruy, as he drew his 
watch from his pocket : " At this moment 



sciences, and to seek in them that complement of the ordi- 
nary morality and popular religion, which the original 
Platonic State had secured by philosophy " (Die Philosophic 
der Griechen, ii. i, 621). For the moral side of education 
much recourse is had to two forces that are but sparingly 
introduced in the Republic — the religious feeUng, and the 
power of public opinion. It is to the latter that Plato looks 
to suppress all irregular and harmful sexual relations, just as 
it has already extinguished incest. The former permeates 
the whole work, and the entire system of the State is based 
upon religion. Cp. Zeller, ii. i, 620. 



134 PLATO ON EDUCATION. 

in every school of France the boys are 
learning such-and-such a page of such-and- 
such a text-book.'* He seems to have 
forgotten what he once knew — that the 
wise man is sure to be in opposition to the 
rest of mankind ; for some degree of eccen- 
tricity generally accompanies originality ; 
as Democritus said, " the philosopher, if 
we could see him, would appear to be a 
strange being.*' In the Magnesian State 
all the citizens are to be reduced to rule 
and measure ; there would have been none 
of those great men " whose acquaintance is 
beyond all price;*' and Plato would have 
found that in the worst-governed Hellenic 
State there was more of a carrier e ouverte 
for extraordinary genius and virtue than 
in his own. The first principle of Plato's 
Laws, borrowed apparently from the Spar- 
tan military system, " that no one is to be 
jowett, Plato, without a Commander," is literally that of 

iv, 165*. 

the J esuit order. i 




CHAPTER IV. 

• ARISTOTLE ON EDUCATION. 

HE theories of Aristotle upon picue ofedu- 

_ . , . cation in 

education bear in many r^- politics. 
spects a striking resemblance 
to those of Plato. He is wholly 
at one with his master in regarding a well- 
ordered education as the necessary basis 
of the constitution of a State, and in attach- 
ing the greatest importance to the influence 
of music. Like Plato he regards education, 
not as pertaining only to the period of 
youth, but as a life-long task.* And he 
would place it not less absolutely under 
the control of the authorities. The supreme 
good for man, and the ultimate object of 
all his manifold endeavours, is happiness ; 

♦ This view is often incidentally given in the Politics, but 
comes out most explicitly in Eth. Nic. x. lo. 



1 3 6 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

and happiness is shown in the Nicomachean 
Ethics by an exhaustive analysis to be 
** the conscious activity of the highest part 
of man according to the law of his own 
excellence, not unaccompanied by adequate 
external conditions." The greater part of 
the Ethics is taken up with the determina- 
tion of the contents of this " law of excel- 
lence " for man. But an important portion 
of the question is reserved for the Politics. 
For the law of man's excellence must be 
ascertained by a complete consideration 
of his nature (c^vo-t?) ; and his <^v(rts plainly 
shows him to be a political creature (ttoXltlkov 
^(oov), much more so than the bee or any 
Pol. i. 2, 10. other gregarious animal. So that really 
tJ </>vcret, the State is anterior to the family 
or to any individual ; and therefore indi- 
viduals are to be regarded primarily and 
essentially as members of a community. 
But here, too, comes in that limitation of 
the idea of a State which we have noticed 
already in Sparta, in Athens, and in Plato's 
ideal Republic. In a perfect State all the 
citizens should be happy; the attainment 
of his own supreme good by every indi- 



THE ST A TE AND THE CITIZEN. 1 37 

vidual is the very raison d'etre of a State, 
and at the same time the necessary con- 
dition of its existence. But men can only 
be happy by virtue, and those who are 
not capable of the highest excellence have 
no right to citizenship. Not only slaves 
but also artisans are excluded by the con- 
ditions of their life from attaining to this Pol. iii. 5, 
supreme excellence. Therefore " the best 
civic community will never admit an artisan 
{pdvav(Tov) to the franchise ; " or, if such be 
admitted, the whole conception of the ideal 
excellence of a citizen must be modilied : 
" for it is not possible to care for the things 
of virtue while living the life of an artisan 
or a slave." The citizen is he who is able to 
take his share in all the duties and honours 
of civic life ; and the purpose of education 
is to enable him to do so aright. 

Now that which makes men " political," Aristotle's 
and raises them above the beasts, is the 
possession of reason and language.* If, 
therefore, the supreme good of man is the 

* The meaning of \6yoQ in the Politics seems to vary 
between these two ideas, or rather perhaps to comprise them 
both. Cp. Pol. i. 2, ID, with Pol. vii. (iv.) 15. 



138 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION, 

conscious activity of his highest part, it 
is evident that the main aim of education 
must be the perfect developement of rea- 
son : 6 Sc Xoyos 7;/xtK /cat 6 vovs ttJs <f>v(r€<i)s tcXos. 

0)CrT€ TTpO^ TOVTOV<S TTJV y€V€(TLV Kol Tr]V TtOV lOiOV Sci 

7rapaxTK€vd^€tv fJi€\€Tr]v (Pol. iv. (vii.) 1 5, 8). But 

although this is the most important object, 
it does not follow that it is to be the first 
attended to. In time the lower has to 
come before the higher, the means before 
Cp. the the end. Man consists not only of soul 

qioted^by i^^'Xv) ^ut also of body ; and the soul itself 
392.^"^* " ^' consists of that which is possessed of rea- 
son {to Aoyoi/ ^x^v)y and that which is irra- 
tional (to dXoyov), the latter being divided 
again into the purely vegetative life, 
common to man with plants and animals 
(to OpcTTTLKov Or <f>vTLK6v), SLiid that whlch to 
a certain extent shares in reason (ixtrcxov Try 
\6yov)y the appetitive and passionate part of 
T//e order of the immaterial principle.* The first thing, 

education, , . 

therefore, to be attended to is the training 
of the body; the second is the moral educa- 

♦ Eth. Nic. i. 13. In Pol, iv. (vii.) 14, of the last it is 
said, TO 5' ovK Ixet yiiv Ka9* avro, Xoyy 8' vicaKovuv iwd' 

fiSVOV. 



ORDER OF EDUCA TION, 1 39 

tion of the desires and passions ; the third 
and highest task is the developement of 
the reason. But it must be borne in mind 
throughout that the first two are not ends 
in themselves, but only means to an end ; 
that the body is trained for the sake of 
the soul, and the passions for the sake of 
the intellect. All the citizens are to share Education 

^, 1 ,• 1 .1 .1 1 common to all. 

the same education, whether they are to be 
rulers or subjects — and this will be deter- 
mined by age rather than by anything else 
— ^for all the members of the State are to 
be made as good as possible. But he Poi. iv. (vii.) 
by no means accepts the doctrine of Plato, 
insisted upon in the Republic, though 
reasserted with much less emphasis in the 
Laws, that the training of men and women 
is to be identical. On the contrary, he lays The differ- 

, 1 . ^ • f , • rr ences between 

much stress on their essential differences, men and 

and maintains that their virtues are far 

from identical. While the slave has no Pol. i. 13, 

*'— II. 
will at all, and the child's is immature, the ' 

woman's is invalid (aKvpov), and waits for 

the sanction of her lord (Kvpto?). So in the 

case of moral excellences, we must admit 

that all possess them, but they vary not 



140 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCATION, 

only in degree but also in kind. The man's 
virtues are those of rule, the woman's those 
of obedience ; hence self-control, courage, 
and justice will be different in her case 
from what they are in his. Men have been 
misled by the use of vague generalities j 
but the real state of the case is clear as 
soon as we examine the matter in detail ; 
for instance : 

Soph. Aj. 261. A modest silence well becomes a woman, 

but this is far otherwise with a man. 

Therefore their whole system of training 

must be different, and it will require a 

Pol. ). 13, 15. separate consideration. But this he 

Cp. Zeller, ii. . , , ^ 

534 (note 2), nowhere bestows upon it, and therefore 

and St. . . f. . . , 

Hiinire, ad we are not m possession oi his views on 
this important branch of the subject. We 
have some clue to the manner in which he 
would probably have handled it in the 
following passage from the Hist. Anim. ix. 
I. (p. 608 B, ed. Bekker: Berl.). "Females 
are tenderer and more mischievous and 
less straightforward, more hasty, and more 
given to thought for the nourishment of 
their offspring ; but males, on the other 
hand, are more spirited, fiercer, more 



THE NA TURE OF WOMAN. 1 4 1 

straightfonvard and less treacherous. A 
woman exceeds a man in pitifulness and 
in her tendency to tears, but on the other 
hand she is more given to envy and cen- 
soriousness, to abusiveness and blows. 
Again, the female is more inclined than the 
male to be dispirited and despondent ; she 
is more shameless and more false, and at 
the same time more easily deceived, and 
of a better memory ; she is also more 
wakeful, but more sluggish, and generally 
less disposed to move than man, and she 
needs less food. The male, as we have 
said, is more ready to give help, and more 
courageous than the female.'* We may 
hesitate before we call this, with Zeller 
(ii. 2. 535, note i), "a careful observation of 
natural histor^^" especially as traits drawn 
from Laconian bitches, bears, and female 
cuttle-fishes are without hesitation trans- 
ferred to women. But it is a sufticient 
proof that Aristotle would have treated the 
question of their education in a very dif- 
ferent w^ay from that which Plato adopted 
upon a hasty generalisation as to their 
absolute identity of nature with men. In 



142 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION, 

the imperfect discussion of the subject of 
education contained in the Politics, it is 
boys and youths who are in view through- 
out. 

As has been said before, the ultimate 

aim of all the State-education of the citizens 

is the full developement of the intellectual 

llie life of powers. But reason (A.oyos) admits of divi- 

action and the . , , . , - 

life of contem- sion \ there is practical reason, concerned 
with the affairs of daily life, and contem- 
plative reason (6 OeioprjriKos). Which of these 
is it that has the strongest claims upon our 
attention ? Aristotle, who in the Nicoma- 
chean Ethics has determined the supreme 
happiness for man to reside in the greatest 
possible continuity of intellectual exercise, 
can have no doubt how he is to answer. As 
war is to be pursued only for the sake of 
peace, and business only for the sake of 
leisure, so the functions of the practical 
reason are of value only as needful for 
fuller and more perfect exercise of the 
speculative reason. This has been too 
much lost sight of by legislators, who have 
regarded success in war as a thing to 
be sought for its own sake ; and conse- 



AIMS OF EDUCA TION. 1 43 

quently their States have been in a healthy 
condition so long as they have been engaged 
in war ; but they have been ruined by 
peace, losing the temper (/3a<^^) of their 
spirit, because they have never been 
educated to a proper use of leisure. In Pol. iv. (vii.) 
Aristotle's time the decay of Sparta fur- 
nished a striking proof of the inadequacy 
of a merely military training for the life 
of a nation ; and he does not fail to make 
use of it to point his moral. Therefore, the 
object of the legislator must be to inspire 
those virtues which are best adapted to 
secure a wise and happy enjoyment of 
peace and leisure. Courage and endurance 
are mainly needed for times of active duty ; 
temperance and justice are also required 
then, but still more in leisure and tran- 
quillity, while philosophy is especially 
appropriate to the latter condition. To 
produce these virtues we need the co- 
operation of (i) the natural disposition, 

(2) habits that become instinctive, and 

(3) ^ right reason. The last is most im- 
portant, but it is the last to appear in the 
life of a child ; its habits precede its 



1 44. ARISTOTLE ON ED UCA TION. 

reasoning judgments, and the habits are 

themselves preceded by natural tendencies. 

Therefore, as we saw before, the care of 

the body is the first thing, then the care 

Pol. iv. (vii.) of the passions, and finally the discipline 
1-2,1422. 

of the intellect. 

Regulation of With Aristotle, as with Plato, the legis- 

marriage. , , _ , ,., -,,1. r 

lator s care for the physical well-being oi 
the citizens commences with the regulation 
of marriage. The special points to be pro- 
vided against are a disparity of age between 
husband and wife, and too early marriages, 
which have the double disadvantage that 
the offspring is likely to be puny, and that 
they are too near the age of the father, and 
so not likely to reverence him as they 
should. The proper age for marriage is 
pronounced to be eighteen for women and 
thirt3/-seven for men ; the main reason for 
such a wide interval between the two is 
apparently that the procreative power in 
husband and wife may cease at about the 
Rearing of same time. Detailed regulations follow as 
to the physical conditions needful for 
securing healthy offspring. Infants who 
are born deformed are not to be reared, 



REARING OF CHILDREN, • 145 

and if the population appears to be pressing 
on the limits fixed by the constitution, 
abortion is to be practised in the early 
stages of the growth of the embryo.* Much 
stress is laid upon the quality of the food 
given to children when young, and Aristotle 
appears to approve of the mechanical ap- 
pliances used, as he says, by some nations 
to straighten their limbs. Until they are 
five years of age they are not be set to 
any studies, nor to any compulsory work, 
but activity of body is to be promoted by 
proper amusements, and their frames are 
to be hardened by exposure to cold. Dif- 
fering here from the Spartan legislator 
[see p. 20] Aristotle will not have them 

forbidden to cry ; f <rvfi<f>€p€L yap Trp6<s av$r]crtv ; 



* This precept of Aristotle's did not find universal accept- 
ation even in Greece. Cp. Stobaeus, 74, 61, and 75, 15 
(quoted by Schomann Alterth. i. 112, note). But in Rome 
there is no trace of any law against abortio partus before 
A.D. 200. Cicero (pro Cluent. 11, 32) has to go to Miletus 
for an example of its punishment. Cp. Daremberg and 
Saglio : Diet. Ant p. 16. 

t Congrevc, on Pol. iv. (vii.) 17, 6, apparently takes 
Ikarafstiq to refer to physical exertions generally ; but it 
must surely be here limited to ** shouts." Cp. the use of 
Ivrecrdfisvoff in Plat. Rep. 536 C ; Ar. Nub. 968, " les cris 
et les pleurs," St. Hilaire. 



146 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

it acts as a gymnastic exercise for little 
children. Like Plato he holds that the 
stories which they are told should be only 
such as are sanctioned by the authorities ; 
they are to be kept away, as far as possible, 
frona the society of slaves, and are not to 
be allowed to witness any of the buffoon- 
eries which the laws allow in the worship 
of some of the gods. Aristotle is indeed 
somewhat doubtful whether any such ex- 
hibitions are to be suffered at all ; but he 
reserves this point for a more detailed 
examination, which is not found in his 
See St. extant works. The point on which he 

Politique lays especial stress is that the first im- 
p. 260.° ^' pressions left upon the mind of a child 
should be wholly free from every kind of 

evil : — ^cnrep yap <f>a<rl ra K€va rwv dyyctW dva<^cpc(v 
Ttts tCjv TrfxtyrtDV cis avra iyxvOevroiv oo-/xds, ovto> koI 

pinio, quoted o,l riHiv viiov .\lnr)(aL From the age of five to 
lior! Ep! °" ^^^^ ^^ seven children are to be lookers-on 
^' ^^* at the lessons, which afterwards they will 

have to learn ; and then they are to be 
taken under the more immediate super- 
vision of the State. 

But now that he has come to the 




EARLY TRAINING. 147 

threshold of education proper, Aristotle Nature of 
raises three questions: (i.) Ought there to cation. 
be any public authoritative system of edu- 
cation? (2.) Ought it to be the same for 
all ? (3.) If so, in what should it consist ? 
The first two are easily answered from his 
point of view ; indeed the theories upon 
which he has been building up the whole 
of his ideal of a State, will only allow 
them to be answered in one way. For 
in the Nicomachean Ethics (ii. i.) he has 
shown that a previous training from child- 
hood up is needful for virtuous actions (in- 
asmuch as virtue resides not in the act, 
but in the moral state (l^is) from which it 
springs); and in the tenth book of the 
same work (c. 10) he has shown that the 
previous training can only, or at any rate 
can best, be had through a system based 
upon public authority. And this is not 
only the case in the ideal State : it is even 
more true in imperfect States like the 
democratic or the oligarchic : for every 
constitution requires for its stability that 
the characters of the citizens should be in 
harmony with it, and this can only be 



1 48 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION, 

secured by a State-ordered system of edu- 
^ , cation. That it must be one and the same 

Pol. V. (viii.) 

i> 2- for all is proved by a consideration of the 

fact that the State as a whole can have but 
one ultimate aim ; things of public concern 
must be dealt with by the public ; and it 
is a grave mistake to suppose that any 
citizen belongs to himself : far rather does 
he belong to the State of which he is a 
i member ; and the State must determine 
his education as it sees to be best, without 
making any distinctions between one and 
another. But with regard to the things 
to be taught there is great difference of 
opinion. Is education to be merely utili- 
tarian, or is it to include moral training, or 
are the higher refinements* of intellectual 
culture also to be aimed at ? All these 
views have found supporters ; so that the 
systems actually in vogue help us little. 
It is certain, however, that useful know- 
ledge ought to form a part of education ; 
but then only that portion of useful know- 

♦ rd irspiTra seems to be used here much in the same 
sense as in Aristotle's well-known description of the dialogues 
of Plato (Pol. ii. 6, 5) with perhaps a touch of depreciation, 
but hardly as St. Hilaiie, *^des ohjets de ^ur agrementy 



TTS CHARACTER. 149 

ledge is to be sanctioned which is free 
from all taint of servility. Every art and 
every study is to be considered servile 
which renders the body or the soul or the 
intellect of a freeman unserviceable for 
the acts and practices of virtue. And 
under this head come all occupations which 
are pursued for wages, for they deprive 
the intellect of leisure and make it abject. 
Even liberal studies, if pursued too far, or 
for improper motives, are liable to certain 
dangers. Perhaps an examination of the Detailed exa- 

c . . . - .- mination of 

various constituents of education in detail the subjects of 

, ^ . 1 . rni education. 

may lead us to more general views. Inese 
are four in number, for to letters, gym- 
nastics, and music some now add drawing. 
It is evident that letters and drawing are 
useful studies ; and the same may be said 
of gymnastics, for this developes that 
courage and bodily vigour which are need- 
ful for the well-being of the State. But 
what of music ? It cannot be said to be 
useful in the same way as these other 
pursuits. The ancients always studied it 
as affording an honourable occupation for 
leisure, and this is the true view. For the 



ISO ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

right employment of leisure is one of the 
most important tasks that can be set to a 
man. Work is always done for some end, 
and therefore has not an independent value 
of its own ; but leisure is an end in itself, 
and can be used at our discretion for the 
highest purposes. It must not be used for 
amusement merely, for that would be to 
make amusement — which is properly only 
a relief from work — the chief end of life. 
The main aim of education is to teach a 
man the right use of leisure ; and music 
has always been justly regarded as one 
of the noblest and most elevating employ- 
ments for such time. It may therefore 
claim its place as one of the most impor- 
tant elements of the higher education. But 
even those arts which are of direct utility, 
like reading, writing, and drawing, are not 
to be learnt solely on the ground of their 
utility : they may have, if properly taught, a 
helpful influence on the mind. To resume, 
then, the detailed consideration of the 
various branches of education, in order 
Gymnastics, previously decided on : — First, the body is 
to be trained by the gymnast and the 



GYMNASTICS, 151 



« 



paedotribe." But care is to be taken 
that gymnastics do not pass into ath- 
letics (cp. p. 28), and that they are not 
carried so far as to injure the character. 
The Lacedaemonians, though they have 
avoided the former error, have fallen into 
the latter. They have formed their system 
with a view to courage alone ; but, in the 
first place, no one virtue is to be pursued 
to the neglect of others ; secondly, if any 
one ought to be so pursued, it certainly is 
not courage ; and thirdly, courage is a very 
diflferent thing from ferocity, as we may 
see in the case of many barbarous tribes. 
Great care must be taken not to overtrain 
boys in gymnastics, or more evil than good 
will be the result. Indeed, they must be 
allowed to spend at least three years in 
their other studies before they begin any 
severe gymnastic exercises ; for " it is not 
proper to put the body and the mind to 
hard work at the same time." We may Pol. v. (viii.) 
pause for a moment in this resume of Aris- 
totle's theories to notice how he agrees 
with Plato on a point which is very strange 
to our modem ideas, " He seems to have 



152 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

thought that two things of an opposite and 
different nature could not be learnt at the 
same time. We can hardly agree with 
him, judging by experience of the effect 
on the mind of spending three years, be- 

jowett, Plato, tween the ages of fourteen and seventeen, 
in mere bodily exercise/* 

Music. Music in its narrower sense was so firmly 

established in the time of Aristotle as an 
essential portion of education, that we 
could have well understood his motives, 
if he had been content to accept the tra- 
ditional ideas upon the subject. But, 
according to his custom, he enters upon 
a careful analysis of the purposes which 
music is intended to serve. Is it simply 
a sensuous gratification, as some assume ? 
Or, has it an ennobling effect upon the 
character ? Or, does it even contribute to 
the developement of the intellect {<fip6vr}a-L^)y 
by supplying it with needful relaxation ? 
It is evident that it cannot be simply 
amusement, or it would form no part of 
education ; for the end of education is not 
amusement. Nor can it be the case that 
the boy is trained to music that he may 



THE PURPOSE OF MUSIC. 1 5 3 

have amusement when he is grown up ; 
for this could be better supplied by the 
services of professional musicians. Nor 
can it be pursued only for its effect on 
the character. In that case, too, there 
would be no need to learn it personally ; 
and it is recognised that there is some- 
thing servile {pavava-ov) in a professional 
study of music. Aristotle's own opinion 
is, that music may be considered at once 
a means of education (TratScta), an amuse- 
ment (TratSia), and a source of enjoyment 
in life (Stayo>y>;),'^ — " an ornament of life 
in its highest form, when the man has 
passed the restlessness of childhood, ever 
in want of amusement; has passed the 
struggles of youth and earlier manhood, 
the period of learning, of discipline, of 
formation of character ; and has reached 
the settled state of life and mature man- 
hood, to be spent not in business or in 
war, but as a period of rest and peaceful 

* The distinction between irai^ta and diaymyi) appears to 
be that the former is rather "childish games," the latter 
** rational relaxation " [cp. v. 5, lo, and Congreve on v. 3, 6]. 
Liddell and Scott appear to be somewhat misleading. See 
Zeller, ii. 2, 577, 5. 



1 54 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 
Congreve, contemplation." It is admitted on all 

Politics of 

Aristotle, hands to be one of the greatest of plea- 
sures ; and that it influences the character 
is clear from its evident power over the 
emotions, for it is the emotions which form 
the character. And as right education 
consists in training men to feel pleasure 
at right objects (cp. Nic. Eth. book ii.), 
the power which music has in this respect 
must be of the greatest value. The dif- 
ferent " modes " are found by experience 
to have different effects. Mixolydian is 
plaintive, the Dorian produces a steady 
calm, the Phrygian excites the passions; 
and these facts are to be remembered in 
using them for purposes of education. 
Practical But is it necessary for boys to acquire 

mtisic, any skill in performing themselves ? Yes : 

for, in the first place, this will intensify the 
effect of music upon them ; and, secondly, 
they must have something to do with 
their hands, or they will be always break- 
ing things. But this practical acquaintance 
with music is not to be carried so far as 
to interfere with other studies, or to teach 
them to perform the wonderful new-fangled 



THE STUDY ^OF MUSIC. 1 5 5 

flourishes (ra Oavfxa(rui koI ircpiTToi tCjv 'dpyow) 

which were coming into fashion in Aris- 
totle's time. The flute was to be rejected, Cp. Hermann 

ad Soph. 

as an immoral instrument, unduly exciting, Trach. 216, 

and the 

and contributing nothing to real education Scholiast 

there (p. 157, 

(Pol. V. 7, 14). Then he proceeds to dis- ed. Elmsh). 

i 1 , t . -1 , *°^ ^i<^- P'o 

cuss the rhjrthms to be permitted : the Mur. § 29. 

moral modes alone are to be employed for 
study, though the more animated and pas- 
sionate ones may be allowed in concerts, 
where the audience only listen, without 
taking any part themselves. A decided 
preference is expressed for the Dorian 
mode, and Plato is censured for having 
in his Republic allowed the Phrygian 
alone to remain by the side of the Dorian 
at the same time that he proscribed the 
music of the flute, which is particularly 
appropriate to it. A greater variety should 
be admitted, in view of the different pur- 
poses to which music is applied. Only 
three requisites are always to be kept in 
mind — the absence of excess (t6 fiea-ov), the 
limits of what is practicable (t6 Swarov), 
and propriety (to irpen-w). 
Here Aristotle breaks off his formal 



156 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 



Incomplete- 
ness of the 
discussion. 



See the very 
complete 
discussion of 
the (juestion 
in Zeller, ii. 
2, 520-527. 



discussion of education. Whether the fifth 
book of the Politics is fragmentary, as 
Schneider, Stahr, Congreve, and Zeller 
maintain, or whether it is perfect, as St. 
Hilaire contends, we cannot decide with 
certainty. But the weight of authority and 
of probability appear to incline to the 
former belief. At all events, we are left 
to gather the views of Aristotle on the 
proper training of the intellect of a nation, 
as best we may, from the principles that 
are established, and the hints that are 
dropped in his other treatises. The phi- 
losopher who made the supreme good of 
man to reside in the vigorous and unim- 
peded play of the intellect, and who, per- 
haps more than any other of his time, 
recognised the absolute necessity of a 
careful and long-continued training to 
produce this, either never lived to give 
to the world his matured thoughts on the 
methods and instruments of this training, 
or he wrote them down only to share the 
fate of others of his most precious works. 
The same caprice of fortune which has 
preserved to us the treatise " De Gene- 



HIS VIEWS INCOMPLETE. 157 
ratione Animal ium/' and robbed us of the Zeiler, ii. 2, 

75, "die 

unerselzlicl 

Pobteien." 



IIoAtTciai, has, it is to be feared, deprived unerseuiichen 



us of what would have been an invaluable 
criticism on the educational uses of litera- 
ture, and the means of developing the 
higher intellectual powers. And even in 
the case of his Poetics, from which we 
might have expected to draw some matter 
for our present purpose, we find on the 
one hand much that is undoubtedly spu- 
rious intermixed, and on the other hand 
we have a singular incompleteness of 
treatment, which leaves some of the most 
important aspects of his subject wholly 
untouched. It can only be considered as 
a fragmentary and largely interpolated 
collection of isolated extracts from Aris- 
totle's original work. The general ends to zeiier, ii. 2, 
which he would have directed his training '" 
may be gathered to some extent from the 
Sixth Book of the [Nicomachean] Ethics, 
where he treats of the intellectual virtues. 
But here again we must notice, first, that 
the Aristotelian authorship of this book 
is more than doubtful. Sir A. Grant has 
shown, I think almost to demonstration, 



1 58 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 
AristoUe's that, with the book which precedes it and 

Ethics, vol. i. , ,../.,, . . . , , r 

pp. 33-43. that which follows it, it is the work of 
Eudemus, and that, although on the whole 
it gives a fair representation of the master's 
views, it is in some points at variance with 
them, and on many points obscure. And 
secondly, the intellectual excellences are 
regarded not so mucn in and for them- 
selves, as in relation to their influence 
Eudtmuson in determining the moral canon. Virtue 
tJaTvirtues. having been previously defined to be a 
mean between two extremes, which mean 
is to be fixed by " right reason,'* it follows 
to explain what this " right reason'' (6 hpBo^ 
\crfo<i) is. The rational part of the soul is 
shown to consist of two parts — the one, 
which may be called the scientific reason 
{to eiTLa-TrjfjiovLKov), dealing with necessary 
principles and the existences depending 

on them {to. roiavra T<av ovroiv wrmf ai opx*^' t^h 
evSixovrai aXXuys fX"»') » ^^^ ^^® Other, the 

calculative reason (to Xjoyurrucuv), to which 
appertains contingent matter. We have 
seen before that there are three principles 
in man — sensation (alaO-na-Ls), reason (vovs), 
and desire (opc^is) — corresponding to the 



THE EUDEMIAN ETHICS, 1 59 

three parts of his nature. Action results 
from the synthesis of desire and the prac- 
tical or calculative reason, when that 
which is affirmed or desired by the latter 
is pursued or avoided by the former. 
Then again it is shown that truth, of 
whatever kind, is attained only by five 
organs of the mind (ots dAiyd€V€t y\ ^)x^)^ 
These are art {r€)(yrj)y science (eVum^fn;), 
wisdom (</>poi'77(ris), philosophy ((ro<^ia), rea- 
son (vovs): the first is the acquisition of 
truth, wM a view to production; the second 
covers the results of syllogistic reasoning; 
the third is right knowledge, with a view 
to action ; the fifth is the organ or mode 
whereby we arrive at principles ; and the 
fourth is higher than all the others, and 
comprehends both wisdom and reason, the 
knowledge of particulars and the grasp 
of principles. The three great divisions 
of human science — ^coXoyiKiJ, fiaOrifiarucrj, and 
(pva-LK-q — are but branches of this all-em- 
bracing oro<^ia. In this classification it is 
evident that the various sections are not 
co-ordinate; and it seems very possible 
that Eudemus comprehended but imper- 



1 60 ARISTOTLE ON ED UCA TION. 

fectly, or else has unwisely attempted to 
improve upon, the psychology of his 
teacher.* Be this as it may, he has left 
us without the means of learning by what 
methods either Aristotle or he would have 
promoted the developement of these several 
intellectual excellences, and which of them 
he would have especially cultivated in a 
Indication of system of national education. We can 
views, only say that he would have laid the 

greatest stress on the formation of vir- 
tuous habits, as a means of attaining prac- 
tical wisdom, ov yap otoi/ re cti/at aya^ov Kvptoo? 

av€V fl>pOVT^(T€(D<S ovSl <f>p6vLfJL0V av€V Trjq yOlKTJS d/0€T^S. 

But this simply brings us back to our 
former position, that Aristotle attached the 
greatest importance to an authoritative 
public discipline of the manners and the 
intellect, and makes us regret the more 
deeply that we can form such imperfect 
conceptions of the detailed form which he 
would have given to it. That he would 
have expanded the common curriculum, 

* The division given in the Posterior Analytics is much 
more clear and satisfactory : there we have three pairs 
mutually contrasted : didvoia vovg, errKTTrjfiri tbxvt], ^povijaig 
oo^ia. Cp. Sir A. Grant on Eth. vi. 4, i. 



INDICA TION OF HIS VIE WS. 1 6 1 

at least for the most advanced students, 
by the addition of a far more scientifie 
rhetoric, and an all but wholly new logic, 
by a wide acquaintance with natural sci- 
ence, and a universal application of the 
historical method of research, may be 
argued fairly from the contents of his 
published works ; but what in his opinion 
should be the order of their study, and 
what the extent to which they should be 
pursued by various classes of the com- 
munity, must always remain uncertain. 
It is only clear, from the well-known ex- 
pression that young men ought not to 
study philosophy, that Aristotle would 
have had a careful and protracted intel- 
lectual discipline precede any attempt to 
grapple with the problems of ethics. To 
art he would certainly have assigned a 
larger place in education than Plato did; 
for while the latter, in his Laws, banishes 
poets from his ideal State, with but few 
exceptions; and directs that the youths, 
instead of committing to memory the epics 
of Homer or the lays of Simonides, the 
lofty lines of ^schylus or the melodious 

M 



1 62 A RISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

choruses of Sophocles, should learn by 

heart the laws and ordinances of the 

Laws, vii. 8ii legislator,'^' Aristotle accepts with approval 

E;cp. 817C. , , . , , 

not only the tragic, but even the comic 
drama. Provided that wit does not dege- 
nerate into scurrility, and that the dra- 
matist chooses for his attack faults that 
are really ridiculous, and not serious moral 

offences — to yap ycAotov k^riv afJLdprrjfia rt Kai 
aTcr^us ayioSvvov Kai ov <f>$apTiK6v — he IS Willing 

to recognise its value. His conception of 
the importance of tragedy in moral edu- 
cation comes out in the much-discussed 
expression, ** effecting a purification of 
passions such as these by means of pity 

and fear," Si iXeov kuI <j>6ftov -mpaivovara tijv 
Zeller, ii, 2, "T^v toioutwv vaOijfxdTiov KaOapcnv. vV hat the 

precise meaning of the phrase is, it is far 
from easy to determine: perhaps the most 
satisfactory view is that of Zeller, who 
regards the "purification" as consisting, 
not in the improvement of the will, or 
the strengthening of virtuous tendencies, 
but in the removal of the evils caused 

* On Plato's views of art, and the dangers to which it is 
exposed, sec Zeller, ii. i, 613. 



(^22, 5. 



GENERAL ASPECTS, 163 

by too violent emotions, and in the calm- 
ing of the passions. This tragedy effects Cp. ZeUer, H. 

1 r ' 1 . i« . -I 1 . /- 2. 611-617. 

by refernng the individual instances of 
suffering and calamity to the common law 
of destiny, and by pointing out under all 
the eternal law of righteousness. 

But it is impossible to weave into any 
consistent and harmonious scheme frag- 
mentary facts like these ; and we are 
obliged to leave imperfect the attempted 
sketch of the thoughts of *' the master of 
those who know," on what he would him- 
self have regarded as the fundamental 
question of national education. 

A few words may be added in conclusion General 

aspects of 

on some general aspects of the question Greek educa- 
under our consideration. They have, it 
is hoped, not been wholly lost sight of 
in the study of the details ; but it may 
be that they will be brought into a clearer 
light, when gathered up together by way 
of a retrospect. There is one point of 
view from which the national education 
of Greece appears to us singularly attrac- 
tive. Like the works of the artists and 
poets who were trained by it, it possesses 



i64 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCATION. 

a unity and completeness within its limits 
that are all but perfect.* Just as 

** The singer of sweet Colonos, and its child," 

who always rises to our thoughts as the 
crown and flower of the Hellenic genius, 

" Saw life steadily, and saw it whole ; " 

so the Greek education laid its hands on 
the entire citizen, and, within the range 
that it recognised, moulded all his powers 
into a finished unity. Beauty of form, 
and grace of movement, subtleness of 
intellect, and nobleness of life were alL 
attained, at least to such an extent as to 
leave no jarring sense of flagrant discord 
between the ideal aimed at and the work 
achieved. This it is that lends so much 
of the charm of those " self-sufiicing ** 
days, in the eyes of those who are wearied 
and distracted with the manifold claims 
of the varied developements of modern 
thought. There is a certain sense of ade- 
quacy, of attainment, of perfection, which 
wins ineffably on those who are harassed 
with the ** blank misgivings," the un- 

* Cp. the remarks on the damTog ai9f)p of Greek litera- 
ture in the '* Guesses at Truth," pp. 39 and 64 (last ed.) 



MODERN THOUGHT, 165 

satisfied yearnings, the baffled aspirations, 
the unsolved problems, that vex alike the 
life and the literature of our times. And 
yet we are bound, while we feel very 
keenly the charm, to recognise the cost 
at which it was won, a cost that we 
could not and would not pay. The deep Contrast of 

modem 

dull hue of much of our modern thought thought. 
is due not solely to the turbid source from 
which it springs : it comes at least as much 
from the profundity of the abysses over 
which it is brooding. If the course of 
the modern student is often perplexing, 
it is not because he is called to traverse 
a desert way, but rather that on every 
side there branch out by-paths, tempting 
him away from the road he has chosen 
by the beauty of the prospects that they 
offer, or the richness of the fruits that 
lie on every hand. If the Greeks were 
not tried by a " Conflict of Studies,*' such 
as that in which we find ourselves, it 
was from the limitation, we may almost 
dare to add, the poverty, of their intel- 
lectual food. It may indeed be that we 
are now constrained to a specialization 



i66 ARISTOTLE ON EDUCA TION. 

which leads to a more one-sided and in- 
complete developement of the whole being 
of a man than the music and gymnastics 
of a young Athenian. But if it be found 
to be so irremediably, we can but take 
refuge in the faith that none have taught 
more unwaveringly than the philosophers 
of Athens, that the well-being of the 
State brings with it the well-being of all 
and every one. If "the individual withers," 
yet " the world is more and more.*' 
Wider extent But again, if we ought to be willing 

of modem r < r 

education. to sacriiice somethmg of the perfect and 
harmonious unity of the Greek education 
for the sake of a deeper culture, much 
more should we be content to do this 
when it is a question of its greater width 
and extension. As we have already seen, 
the very phrase of national education in 
Greece is all but a misnomer. Thanks 
to the lessons we have learnt from the 
Gospel of Christ, we cannot look with 
complacence upon any "national educa- 
tion," however well-rounded and self- 
sufficing, whose benefits are not shared 
by the artisan, the peasant and the factorj^- 



MODERN ED UCA TION. 1 67 

liand. The task which the legislators of. 
to-day have set before them is one far 
harder than any with which Plato or 
Aristotle dared to grapple. It is to see 
that every child of Britain's thirty millions 
has placed within his reach that training 
which shall fit him most completely to 
serve his fellow-men in the station in 
which it has pleased his God to place him. 
It may be that still we are far from the 
goal. Educational theorists are debating; 
class-interests bar the way ; and, worst of 
all, sectarian jealousies WTangle, till it 
seems at times that the day for which 
every Christian is longing would never 
come to us- But come it must at last : 
and then we shall see in the national 
schools of England a physical training 
not inferior to that of Athens or Lace- 
daemon; heart and soul shall learn to 
love yet nobler truths than those which 
dawned before the eyes of Plato; and the 
wisdom of Aristotle shall be as childish 
fancies to — 

«« The fairy-tales of science, and the long results of time." 

PRINTEP BY VIRTUE AND CO., CITY KOAD, LONDON 



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